yet another list

Life's been going past me in a rush. Its almost been four months since I came to Chennai and as much as I've experienced urban angst, constantly wondering what I'm doing in this multitude of humanity, I'm also having a lot of fun. Apart from the film festival, I have been to a few Carnatic music concerts, and though by no measure have I completely understood or experienced them, it was certainly humbling to know that people who are as knowledgeable and passionate about the art form continue to practice and encourage it. On the other hand, The Hindu Lit Fest and it's sister event, the documentary fest, were incredibly enjoyable experiences. I saw documentaries on MT Vasudevan Nair and UR Ananthamurthy and for someone who's always shown interest in Western literature and treated Indian literature with certain skepticism, it was truly an eye-opening experience. The kind of topics they deal with, their narrative styles and their relentless pursuit towards truth and perfection both humbled me and also piqued up my interest in looking back at Indian Literature, especially Telugu literature, with new eyes.

The Hindu Lit Fest also happened to be a delightful 2 days, with Gulzar saab's rendition of his poetry being the cherry on the cheesecake. I have never been a fan of writers reading out their work to an audience but having listened to him, orating with the flair of a thespian his poem Budiya Re, I will always be indebted to him for the tear-inducing experience. Furthermore, listening to William Dalrymple sweep the auditorium with his erudition and his capacity to make history come alive made me wonder how much more children would love History if teachers were as passionate. And Pablo Bartholomew's photo-essayesque talk about the Bhopal Gas Tragedy was so enchanting in its imagery and so heartfelt in its compassion, that he received a standing ovation at the end of the talk. It was a great experience being a part of an event where people cared about the work of the artists, which was abundantly clear by the questions they asked, and I felt good being a part of something where the speakers, despite their staggering achievements, treated the audience with respect.


Budhiya Re (Old Woman)

Budhiya Re, Tere saath to maine
Jeene ki har shah baanTi hai

Dana-Pani, KapaDa-latta, Neende.n aur Jagaraate saare
Aulaado.n ke janane se basane ta,k aur bichhaDanae tak
Umra ka har hissa baanTa hai

tere saath judaai baanTi, rooth, sulah, tanhaai bhi
saari kaarastaaniya.n baanTi, jhooth bhi, sach bhi

Mere dard sahe hai.n tune
Teri saari peeDe.n mere poro.n se hokar gujari hai.n

Saath jiye hai.n,
saath mare.n
ye kaise mumkin ho sakataa hai

dono.n me se ek ko ik din,
dooje ko shamshaan pe chhod ke
Tanha waapas lauTana hoga

Budhiya re!


Also, I have been having art related conversations with people like Murali Rajan and Veturi Sarma, and talks about Artificial Intelligence and Neural Networks with Deepu mama. And like I mentioned, thanks to those two legendary Indian writers, I started reading the Ramanas ( Mullapudi and Sri ). I had loved Midhunam the movie a lot but never got around to reading the story until a few days ago. Brilliant. Although for me Sri Ramana's best story is by far Bangaru Murugu which I read frequently. The first time I finished reading it, my hands were trembling and my heart was filled with love and gratitude. And whenever I read it out for other people, a process I enjoy a lot, the smiles stuck to their faces tell me how lucky all of us are to be amongst such great literature. I also started reading Kinige Patrika and it's great especially for beginners like me who want to get into reading Telugu.

Talking of Midhunam, I put it fourth in the list of favourite films for The Hindu My Five.  To visit the regal The Hindu office in Chennai and to see my name printed in the newspaper I highly love and admire were surreal experiences. And by the way, the assignment I mentioned in one of my previous posts went bust. But I'm working on two new things, and since they are midway through anyway, I am pretty confident they're going to see the light of the day. I am also reading Sophie's World, which despite the irritatingly adolescent language, looks like a good guide to starting out with Western Philosophy, and Prem Panicker's Bhimsen which is recommended for those of us who can't currently afford MT Vasudevan Nair's highly acclaimed Randamoozham. I haven't seen any films worth recommending though Spike Jonze's her is an interesting, if mildly trippy, watch and I'm still chipping away on the superhuman Woody Allen repository. And as of music, listening to Saptapadhi songs in loop. Veturi and KV, meeku saashtangam.

Of late, every one of my posts is seeming like a have-done/to-do list of sorts and I'm sorry for it. The thing is I don't have a laptop with me so despite writing pretty regularly, I haven't been posting things up as regularly as I'd like to. [ The above statement is assuming people actually care about this blog being updated. ] That's all for now. And oh, hang on, my friend Vinod is now a part of That's Life. He is a brilliant street photographer, I'm a huge fan of his work and I hope someday he becomes as great as his idol Henri Cartier-Bresson who's pictures overawe me.

Till next time,
happy exploring.

Cinema Darling, Cinema

The Chennai International Film Festival 2013 was a lot of fun. I watched 10 films in 9 different languages in 4 days. Here's the list:

Salvo
Mold ( Kuf )
Like Father, Like Son
How to Describe a Cloud
Waiting for the Sea
A Long and Happy Life
Nordvest
A Touch of Sin
Young & Beautiful
In Bloom

Of all these films, 1 was outstanding, 2 highly enjoyable, 2 downright depressing and the others falling somewhere in between.

I would actually recommend Like Father, Like Son to every parent and child. It is very powerful and tear-inducing but also outrageously funny and deeply charming. Hirokazu Koreeda directs with a very sympathetic eye and a very gentle touch; He shows us how deeply flawed we can be but also tells us that we can redeem ourselves. The actors are a treat to watch, especially the kids who seem to have been left to be themselves, with the actors playing fathers deserving special mention. I have read about Koreeda's other work and I think he is a filmmaker one cannot afford to miss.

I was awed by Bakhtiar Khudoijinazarov's audacity, and though by no means is Waiting for the Sea a masterpiece, the fact that it aspires to scale the epicness of individual ambition makes it a compelling watch. These days when film protagonists are getting more and more solipsistic and film worlds are deeply entrenched in existentialism, it is heartening to see a hero, who in the spirit of Greek gods takes upon himself an impossible task and accomplishes it with the sheer force of his will.

On the other hand, Michael Noer's Nordvest is if anything, a stark opposite of Waiting for the Sea. Here we have an 18- year old petty robber in a dog-eat-dog, urban jungle of Denmark, totally clueless about the meaning and purpose of his life, and being pushed and pulled by factors beyond his control. It is an example of the kind of films European art film circuit has helped popularize around the world ( work of filmmakers like Michael Haneke, Bela Tarr, Lars Von Trier come to mind ) in the last couple of decades. These films deal with European philosophies that came about around the Great Wars and deal with grim issues like like absurdism, determinism, nihilism, the meaninglessness of life and are marked by very grim aesthetic sensibilities like shooting in real time, with no discernible camera movement, almost no background score and a reluctance to explain to the audience the motivations behind the actions of the characters. All that matters is the act- Either because the character could not help but do it or because it has done it. What we and the character should now care about are the repercussions. Nordvest could have been bleak and a bore to watch, but Noer makes up for his high art sensibilities by ensuring that the camera movement is handheld and kinetic, which brings a certain sense of urgency to the proceeding, and editing it ruthlessly. No shot is one moment too long.

Good editing is a compliment I cannot offer to films Ali Aydin's Mold, Fabio Grassadonia and Antonio Piazza's Salvo and  Nana Ekvtimishvili and Simon Grob's In Bloom. The problem with making an art film is you want to come off as deep and insightful and just because a few past masters used long, uninterrupted shots that must have meant something in the context, it does not mean that any film that has moments of inactivity is an intelligent one. The three films I mentioned above were trying to impress than inspire and that left me cold. I can watch films that are idiosyncratic and egoistical but these were just plain boring. And that left me thinking about how hard it is to truly make a film that utilizes moments of inactivity so well to deliver the intended effect.

Boris Khlebnikov's A Long and Happy Life is an earnest film talking about socialism in this age and how modern societies convert even well-meaning, idealistic young men into cynics. It is meant well, moves at a reasonable pace, again with no background music but the ending seemed too abrupt. The transformation of the young man could have been handled much more sympathetically but Khlebnikov does not spend even one moment empathizing with his protagonist. Everything is presented as distantly as possible and though this ensures there is no adulteration, it grabs only our attention but not our imagination.

I cannot describe David Verbeek's How to Describe a Cloud. I will leave by saying that I went there to watch the highly acclaimed Kattell Quillevere's Suzanne but due to some technical issues, they screened How to describe a cloud and I found the first fifteen minutes so dull and dry that I dozed off. When I woke up about twenty minutes later, I couldn't make head or tail of what was trying to be said but ended up watching the bleak-toned film just because I couldn't go back to sleep.

That leaves us with Jia Zhanke's A Touch of Sin and Francois Ozon's Young & Beautiful. I had to come running from Casino to Woodlands, a distance of about two kilometers, just to get a seat for A Touch of Sin. Everyone I had been bumping into spoke about it and it was even recommended by the festival curator. Sure enough, Nikhil and I could only find the seats in the first row empty and watched the film with sore butts and aching necks. I don't know if that contributed to my experience but I found the film to be cheap, sensational and hellbent on shocking the viewer with the gore portrayed. I don't know what the criteria of the Cannes film festival is to pick up nominations for the Palme D'or, but I don't think sensationalism is one of them. At times it felt too much like a Balaji Sakthivel film where nothing even remotely good happens to the protagonists and though that might actually be true, the filmmaker uses that as an excuse to savagely demonstrate violence than as a cue to observe and celebrate their lives. No, definitely not worth the neck pain.

Young & Beautiful casts a ravishing actress in the role of a teenager who is coming to terms with her sexuality and it documents her life through four seasons. Though the story is hardly new, and is not even treated all that differently, it is a stunning film to look at. Marine Vacth is a gorgeous woman and the camera does justice to her beauty by just letting it linger on her. And though the film tries to come off as poetic, it follows rules too rigidly for it surprise or amuse us.

Apart from those films, I watched Lucia. Totally fell for it, and though the story invariably brings up Nolan comparisons, I thought Pawan Kumar's tone was really new and his approach very Indian. The film is a must-watch and must be commended for its work in all departmens though Satish Neenasam's works deserves a special mention. He so effortlessly straddles the worlds of a lonely, confident superstar and a nervous, bumbling but happy torch-shiner that midway through the film, I totally forgot that it was just one actor performing two different roles. Searing. I also watched Woody Allen's Manhattan Murder Mystery and re-watched Anything else, which incidentally is his first film I ever saw way back in 2004. Did I know that I would be such a big fan of his work? I don't think so, but even then he had appealed to my sensibilities probably because his films do not seem to follow a story structure or a narrative arc. They happen just because they're funny and interesting. Only now, after watching and reading about so many of his films, am I learning to appreciate the kind of work and genius it goes into making something seem so effortless. And then, this afternoon, I saw Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain. Though I am a huge fan of The Wrestler and A Requiem for a Dream and though this film breezed by, I found myself unsatisfied. This did not seem like it was an Aronofsky movie, it didn't have the unflinching gaze or brutal honesty of his other films, and the story was too thin to be masked with pop philosophy and fancy editing. Ebert in his review of the film spoke about a director's cut. I will be waiting for it too.

Apart from introducing me to a large range of film which I wouldn't have known otherwise, the film festival also had a happy side-effect. For the first time in my life, I was in the midst of people who took cinema as seriously as I did and I bumped into film buffs from IIST, assistant directors from Telugu and Tamil film industries, a couple of cinematographers and 50 year old men who seemed as ecstatic as a kid in a toy room. The film mania was permeating. Also, I missed a couple of films that I wanted to watch, Paulo Sorrentino's The Great Beauty and Bojan Vuk Kosovcevic's The Whirlpool, I will be sure to catch them out soon.

So that's how things have been on the film side. And the title of this post is inspired by this song.

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. 

The genius of Trivikram Srinivas

After I received a lot of flak for telling people I hated Attharintiki Daredi, I went back to watch a few of Trivikram's old films to truly understand what I mean when I said his earlier films were so much better. And though, straightaway,  I realised Attharantiki Daaredi was his worst writing assignment, I also knew it wasn't as bad as I initially made it out to be. It was probably just that Trivikram's set such a high benchmark for his writing skills that what would seem mediocre efforts for other writers, seemed well below the par for a Trivikram film. As I spoke to other Trivikram fans and they told me that they shared similar feelings, that the quality of his writing had been definitely on a decline since Khaleja, I wondered what exactly was going wrong, why we weren't remembering his dialogues as easily as we did with his earlier films and why his characters were beginning to seem so ordinary. So, I thought I'd do a little analysis of his comic style and characterization.

If we were to compare the comic styles of two other Telugu filmmakers who are well-versed in the genre of using protagonists as comic actors, Srinu Vaitla and Puri Jagannadh, it makes us easier to understand what makes Trivikram's brand of comedy so powerful but also so enduring. His comedy is evergreen, contrary to Edward De Bono's theory that a joke is funny only once. How does it work, over and over again?

Srinu Vaitla's comedy is about the revenge of the underdog. In his films, unimportant characters and cunning men, laugh at the expense of our heroes, who eventually find ways to give it back to them in the end. Dramatic irony is the cornerstone of his comic structure; we know it is only a matter of time before arrogance is punished. In Puri Jagannadh's films, the protagonist is the outsider, the guy who's reactions to the most commonplace incidents are so unanticipated that it takes us by surprise and makes us laugh.

Now, when you see Trivikram's comedy, across all his films, he doesn't dumb his characters down for the audience to laugh at their expense. Ofcourse, comedy needs someone to be made fun of, usually the comedian, but in Trivikram's films, the audience laugh at themselves. How does that work? The answer lies in the most famous charge levelled against Trivikram- All his characters speak the same way. Yes, on the surface level it might seem like everyone's cracking off punch dialogues but right beneath it lies the secret. Trivikram's characters are not ludicrous. They are normal people, living by their set of ideas and ideologies, but elevated to a higher plane of intelligence. Unlike other writers, his supporting cast is not at the service of the hero; a fiercely independent streak runs through all of them.  And we laugh simply because we are stunned at the audacity and intelligence of his characters who don't mind taking jigs at the lead. Trivikram's practically thrown the rulebook out as the tongue-in-cheek dialogue in Nuvve Nuvve suggests.

"Ikkada punch estey evadu veyyali ra?"
"Nuvvu"
"Mari nuvvem cheyali ra?"
"Navvali"

Another probable reason behind his incomparable success as a writer has been his ability to distil dialogues to their essence, so lacking in Atthaeintiki Daaredi. Trivikram's characters choose the straightest past, saying as little as possible yet revealing a lot about themselves, to keep the story moving forward. Which is ironic because he's not the Maatala Mantrikudu like his fans claim. He does not write flowery language for beautiful imagery nor take a tangential route just because it's cleverer, something Tarantino does really well. His language I think, with all respect and admiration, will be how robots talk when we finally teach them how to talk.

 If someone else wrote dialogues this flat and bereft of emotion, with extreme lack of flair and romanticism, we'd boo them out. Now, here comes Trivikram's magic. His dialogues are sparse but his scenes are dense. His films are so packed with wonderful characters that if any other director tried to replicate his writing style, they'd be making 5 hour movies just to do justice to all those colourful people. He and Sukumar are the finest screenplay writers in the industry now. But while Sukumar's screenplays use very original and maverick characterizations, Trivikram's power is in making the ordinary man seem extraordinary. Banthi, Paddu, Balu ( Brahmanandam in Malleswari ), Bunk Srinu, Pandu, Ramana (I'm beginning to realise how well he writes Sunil's characters ), Naidu among others are characters very similar to what we've been seeing all along. But what makes them so memorable is that Trivikram spends time with them, lets them talk, respects their intelligence and identity.

What was the whole point behind all that I've been saying all along? I don't really know, I just had to say it I guess. Why do some people write critical pieces on the work of other artists? Is it to show admiration or to find loopholes in the work of others out of envy? When we aren't making stuff anyway, do we have a right to critique others'? What exactly are the responsibilities of being a critic? I guess I'm figuring that out but I've been writing opinion pieces lately because I want people to start talking about art. Critiquing cinema is a noble profession, an art at that; read Roger Ebert or Raja Sen or Baradwaj Rangan or PS Suresh Kumar. And like those folks helped me see films from a totally different angle, I write for that one kid out there who's head is buzzing with questions on the nature of art, conformity with the masses, tools for objectivity and the auteur's intention behind the making of every shot. True, watching cinema is a solitary experience but discussing it can be an enriching one.

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.

aadat se majboor

It has been about two months since I read Sam Harris' Free Will, which despite being a short read gives a lot to chew upon, and I have been trying to see if his theory fits my version of reality. I have to confess I'm not really surprised to learn that I find it holding on despite any situation I throw at it. In the book, Sam Harris speaks about the lack of free will in our lives and how all of us are prisoners of our pasts, our biological and cultural upbringings, and all that we think to be our choices might not after all truly be choices. My interest in the filed sprung up after I heard Anand Gandhi's TedX talk where he spoke about a certain fungus that enters the brain of an ant and affects it's thought process by regulating it's sensory inputs. ( I highly recommend the talk and the post ). The more I look at the nature of people and see that intelligence is a very relative concept, the more I'm getting inclined to believe that we after all are just a baggage of half-baked ideas and adulterated experience. Though before I go further, I have to take into account that since I'm viewing the whole thing from a very subjective perspective, my view of the issue is coloured by my own prejudices and preferences. It might also be the case that since I have this hammer in my hand, whatever I see looks like a nail. Which again reinstates my belief in lack of objectivity and absolute truth.

Now when I was looking for answers to the questions posed by Harris, I came across UG Krishnamurthi's The Mystique of Enlightenment in which UG argues that we can do absolutely nothing about enlightenment, that it is simply a biological phenomenon and that if and when it has to happen, it will. And after that I looked around the biology of a human, more specifically the nature of the brain, the physical manifestation of ideas and emotions, the really thin difference between living and dying to the point where right now I'm pursuing the meaning of being human and if we are Biology or just Chemistry. ( All this from bits and pieces of Richard Dawkins, VS Ramachandran, Mary Roach and conversations with two young Pharma students, Dheeraj and Ravie ). Unfortunately, or probably not so much, since I'm juggling between all these things, validating and verifying all these non-concrete ideas in relation to the influence of art and if reaction to it is just a bunch of secreted hormones, I have not been able to gain any deep insights. All I have, therefore, is a post that is just a collection of haphazard thoughts.

Or maybe those thoughts are not so haphazard. I can see that all of them follow a pattern. And everything I learn now is contaminated by my past experience and will affect anything I will learn later on. Taking it further, I can also claim that I learn something because what I once did has paved a path for me to learn this now. Which means that what I was once has shaped me into being what I am now. But right from the moment I was born, I have always been reacting to what life has given me; my genes, my family, my environment which in turn have made me choose ( sarcasm intended ) the path that I have walked upon so that I have turned into this unique being that only I am in the entire universe. And this is what surprises me the most when people are not happy with where they are now and say reflectively, " If only I hadn't done it back then". If they hadn't done it back then, they wouldn't be here right now repenting, right, but then they could not have done otherwise because that was the only thing they were capable of doing back then. Or maybe it's that they have to repent now because its the only way they can react. This is what is so annoying about arguing for a concept this abstract; every statement I make is irrefutable but also indefensible. A lot similar to talking about someone like God. Either you intuitively get it or not. ( Shit, that statement is like a mini time-bomb ).

Imagine a series of infinite universes, multiverse if you like, stacked one on top of other, and of the two choices you have every moment ( that's all we have really- to do this or not do this ), another universe is created with the choice I didn't make. Actually, such a system would be wilder than we can imagine because for each of those choices we didn't make, there stem out two other choices and so on and so forth. Anyway, I turned atheist a few days ago. Now, that doesn't make sense because when you look at my birth or upbringing or cultural influences, I have been surrounded by the idea of God. Then isn't it a truly free decision I turned atheist, defying my past and surrounding? Come to think of it, it really isn't that surprising. I have been trained in Rational Thinking, in a lot of ways I am surrounded by bad interpretations of mythology which don't match up to my idea of reality, I have been following closely the work of Four Horsemen of New Atheism, I don't really find a need for God and very importantly, it has helped me overcome childhood fear of ghosts and Pretatmas because like Amma pointed out, I took what she taught me and inverted it head-on. ( She always told me not to be scared of ghosts because where there is negative energy, there will also be positive energy. When I don't believe in the idea of Positive Energy aka God, my logic tells me there can't be demons either ). Will I be atheistic for as long as I live? I don't know, but speculating from what my past record has been, I'm not too positive on it. I might come across a Spiritual Scientist who might manage to convince me, or find a real need for God and have my prayers answered, or simply wake up one morning and realise that science's reach can go only so far. What I will be I can not know until I'm in that situation then.

Hang on, is that statement not illogical? If I'm a prisoner of my past and can't get off my rail track no matter how much I try ( infact, I can't even try getting off the railway track because that's the only thing I know; just remembered this brilliant hypothetical situation I read  that all of us are prisoners and just because we don't even know it's a prison, we can't even contemplate that there exists a world outside of our walls ), why can't I predict my future? If we take into consideration the paths of all things that live in our world and calculate all their intersections and repercussions of their actions, then we can map out our futures precisely but otherwise, it is simply beyond the capacity of our imagination. All of us are trapped and we can only be ourselves. So just take it easy. Is that frightening or liberating? I guess how you look at it depends on what your journey has been like so far.

isn't living a verb?

What we are and What we want to be- there is a constant conflict between those two things. And we are truly happy in those fleeting moments, when both those things align. But what if you grown into a wreck who does not care about wanting to be anything? Zen says journey is the reward. It might have helped all those who had turned into nervous wrecks because no matter how much they tried, they couldn't be what they wanted to be. But what if you are so scared of failure that you don't try to be anything. What if you don't set yourself a goal because you might never reach it. What if, under the pretext that you are enjoying the journey,  you wile away a lifetime not going anywhere. I have spent the last one year doing almost nothing, and have been able to justify it. If you are smart, are you smart enough to know you are not that smart?

Today, thanks to Sravani, I came across a website called zenpencils and it contains such powerful, inspiring quotes that I'm actually sitting down to finish this post despite the fact that I feel really rusty doing it. Maybe Sam Harris is right, free will does not exist. Maybe the world is deterministic, or maybe what I should be vying for is enlightenment. But despite admitting that those ideals might be true, I am still not an happy man. Because I have never believed in anything enough to see it to the end. Which is a pity because under the pretext of trying things, I haven't really tried anything. A suicide bomber is probably a happier man than a mid-management executive in United Nations because only one of them truly believes and has the conviction to stick to it to his end. I was doing a mental checklist of things I've started in life but never took them till the end, or atleast a checkpoint. Apart from very few things, though I start things with much zest and clamour, I haven't taken them far enough to understand what they mean. Passion is like love, it is transient. It is like inspiration, that eureka moment. It is what introduces us to something but it is not enough to drive us. The goal we envision turns hazy just after a few miles. We get distracted, the learning curve turns really steep, the sacrifices seem too much and atleast in my case, I feel I'm letting go of life in pursuit of a vision. But I'm beginning to understand, atleast hoping, that discipline and commitment are far more important. Now, the Zen koan is coming to life. In my journey towards a certain destination, I will learn about myself. In a way, all this has been a journey too, to a destination I did not foresee. In the last one year, I've learnt a few things about myself, that now I'm able to retrospect. But it's just that I never wanted to be here. Like Chris Hadfield says, " Don't let life randomly kick you into the adult you don't want to become."

I do not like so many things about myself. And I want to change. Prior experience tells me that it is going to be tough but it is also going to be revelatory. that there will be so many moments when I'd want to quit but that I should not, that an imperfect life truly lived in pursuit of excellence is much better than a life spent making a perfect plan. I have always been invigorated by details to think about the bigger picture. Like someone vying for the perfect beginning and dies not going past thousands of beginnings. Maybe that is the way I am, or that I've taught myself to think that way, but I convince myself not to push too far because my body does not agree/ it is the wrong thing/ resistance means not following you heart. Even right now, as I write this, there is a constant tug-of-war between what I want myself to believe in and what my habits ask me to. How do you differentiate between barriers life does not want you to cross because it is leading you in the right way and obstacles that life wants you to overcome to become stronger? If I want to be something now and start working towards it, when the process changes me and my mind tells me I do not want that anymore, is that my being not wanting to go out of its comfort zone or truly a divine correspondence guiding me onto my Karma path? My problem, unlike a lot of others, is not that I'm doing something I don't want to. It's just that in my process of finding the love of my life, thanks to Steve Jobs Mania leftovers, I'm not doing anything else.

Or it's just that maybe they're right. I have never been able to hear the whispers of my heart because of the outside noise that I create. But like Maitreya says in Ship of Theseus, if all judgements are to be taken in the isolation of conveniences and prejudices, will my heart, influenced by myriad things ever be able to tell me what I truly ought to be. Is it all just poetic drivel that Steve uttered to get hoorays from the crowd or does art truly tell us what we are destined to be? If I can be anything I want to be, why can't I become someone who believes that I can be anything I want to be? If I should do what I truly believe in, and not care about others' opinion, will I be inspired enough to do what I want to?

-Why do you still do it?
-I do it for the beauty of the act.
-But they say beauty lies in the eye of the beholder.
-Yes, but what if there is no more beholder?
                -Holy Motors, French, 2012

I reek of half-baked philosophical bullshit. Doing is such a relief, after all the thinking; it gives a certain meaning to life, a sense of accomplishment. What do we have to show for after we have reached the dusk of our lives; apart from the things we've done. I might imagine the greatest of stories but if they don't transform into a physical manifestations that others can experience, are they worth anything? Our identities are shaped by memories, ours and others'. Ours might revolve around our thoughts and dreams but others' do only around our actions. And if we don't have others to validate what we've been through, what would be the difference between a dream and reality? Some nights, when I can't sleep, I think what my motivations are to go on living. Should my driving force be a fear of oblivion or adulation while I'm alive? Neither of them seem satisfactory enough. The only reason I want to do anything is to feel fully alive. Everything else, for experience, for entertainment, for pushing my boundaries, for the sake of humanity seems trivial. And the only way I've ever felt alive is when my mind is totally occupied, when what I do so captivates me that I don't mind the rest of the world crumbling into pieces; that in pursuit of that one word, one 'I love you', one perfect frame, I can spend a lifetime and discover all that I can about myself. For me to know what I am, I have to go and rule out all that I'm not.

entertaining ourselves to death

Facebook has turned into a really nice analogy to talk about the society. It is probably the nearest we have to look at our world objectively. This post is more or less a continuation to my previous post and I might be touching a lot of subjects I spoke about yesterday. One thing that I have to thank Facebook for teaching me is our need for validation. We want people to like our pictures, we want to tell them what we've gone through, we want to rant out in public ( a blog is just another tool ), we want them to think that our lives are more special than we think they are because we want witnesses. Anonymity scares us. So does futility. When things don't go well, we want to be reminded how special we are and how we are just going through a phase. That is probably why we go through our albums, our posts every now and then. To remind us that we've lived. How else can we prove ourselves that we didn't just pop into the world. Friends, relationships, anniversaries, convocations, events are all what we leave so that when we look back, void will not confront us. Amnesia can be a boon but it turns into a nightmare because then we won't have a proof to commemorate our lives. Honestly, what do we have if not the solace of memory alone. And lest we forget a few things about ourselves, we create relationships and use them as custodians to our lives. I find Sadhus to be extremely courageous people, if not for anything else, just for accepting the triviality of our lives and for moving on without a fuss.

It's idiotic to take ourselves seriously. We laugh at the problems that confronted us 5 years ago. What troubles us so much right now, would be inconsequential the next morning if only we are confronted with a bigger problem. We are so fickle minded in our treatment of problems that we don't deserve to be confronted by the truly puzzling ones. I might be fuming at my girlfriend right now but if only she'd appear here with that beaming smile, the anger would evaporate. And what, I won't even remember that I was supposed to be angry. It's pathetic. What we want to be is entertained. We are so restless that we want to fill our minds with things, the good if available and the bad if not. Entertainment is the prerogative. The brilliant thing about getting entertained is that we don't care about anything. We are so engrossed in it that nothing else seems to matter; a movie seems so real and so worthwhile as long as we have conceded our sense of disbelief. Which is not essentially a bad thing but I would rather live than spend a lifetime in movie theatres. A pursuit for money is a form of entertainment; it creates an illusion of movement. So, is the pursuit for approval or even the pursuit for knowledge. To hell, even the pursuit for happiness is just a need for occupation. Why do I have to achieve anything? What is wrong with just sitting back and waiting for life to happen.

I'm beginning to believe in the notion of sitting under a tree and doing nothing. Just being. All these emotions of Happiness, Jealousy, Elation, Craving, Misery etc. are emotions we create to fill our heads, to create that sense of living. What if there is a person out there who spends his life watching movies, reading books, talking to people, listening to music just so that he can keep himself occupied. He needs to keep running because he is so scared that others will pass him if he doesn't. It keeps him from boredom but doesn't it create an unnecessary fear he has to live with all his life. What if he gradually slows down until he stops to ask himself where he is running and why. For all he knows, people would still be running and he'd be left behind. But what if he's always run in a circle, will he still be behind others? Haven't Yogis coined a stunning word for that circle- Samsara. What a word, I don't know if it's the sound or the psychological effect of knowing what it means that creates such a powerful emotion within me, but it somehow brings into perspective the whole idea of life. How helpful is happiness if it is just a better movie than misery. It's much more fun, true, but it's still as virtual as misery. Come to think of it, why should we even be in pursuit of truth, or enlightenment? Like Anand Gandhi so evocatively says, why do we have to believe that enlightenment is the highest ideal; Just because Buddha told us? What if Buddha himself stopped midway? And like someone once asked Sadhguru, even if you get enlightened, how do you actually know that you are actually there?

If anything the mind creates is an illusion, so must be all that I've been talking about. Even if the mind, as an individual entity exists, how can it have the power to look at itself? I'm in a very precarious position. If I consider all that I've said to be true, then what I'm saying is false. And if all I'm saying is false, how can it lead to be truth? How can we know we're trapped if all that we've ever known is the place we are trapped in? Am I even looking for answers or like I mentioned before, looking for adulation or entertainment? Maybe I'm just jealous that others are achieving so much in their lives that I feel a need to fill this all up, to prove them that I'm working on much more important issues. And if living is a exercise in futility, isn't enlightenment then too? 

questions and answers

How is it that we don't ask questions, the big ones like what is the meaning of life, what does love mean, how do we fit into the bigger scheme of things, when things are going fine? When we are laughing with friends, or when we are totally invigorated in working on something, or when we are spending a very memorable day with the loved one, we are so involved with life, lost in the moment that we don't stop back, look at ourselves and think where we are heading. Living turns into such a huge pleasure that questioning it seems futile. Why do I have to care what anything means as long as I'm having a blast. Like when you are totally enamoured by your girlfriend that you don't even care to ask yourself if you are going to keep any of those promises; or when the other guy turns into such a great listener that you go on and on and don't even remember those days when you hated him so much. How does it work? If I was successful right now, looked up by friends, pampered by loved ones, would I even spend the time here, searching for the right words to get the meaning across? Is that why most philosophers, monks, scientists and artists have had such painful pasts that the only way they could be happy was to look inwards and shun the world away? Is the quest for truth, ethics and aesthetics more about escapism than liberation?

Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, the olfactory genius in Suskind's Perfume, is so enveloped in the pleasure of smell that he walks away from all civilization to a dark, dank place at the bottom of an extinct volcano where no life thrives, just so that he can summon various smells from his mental repository, mix them around and become ecstatic. Now, that is art for the sake of it. He asks for no appreciation, no reconfirmation of his gifts, has no need to change the world, demands no respect from his peers, requires no acclaim. If only all of us could find immense pleasure simply in the prospect of living, would we go through these phases of happiness and misery- making adjustments to ourselves just so that others would change for us, trying to adjust expectations so that those we want to love can fit in. I came across this phenomenal line a few days back, "Despite knowing that life would never go according to our plans, why do we continue making them". I think that when we make plans, we see ourselves living through them like we are now. What we do not take into consideration that living through a plan changes us and so we are not as happy as we thought we would be even if we reached a prior decided destination. I sometimes wish that instead of running, I could stop, get a sense of my bearings and decide on my course of action. But like Dheeraj's film trailer says, to live is to run, I simply can't stop. Which is probably why monks move away from civilization, to create a sense of suspension. How can you know if time has passed if you're living every moment the same way? Maybe that is what they call the ripple-less pond where they can see their true reflections.

Philosophers and evolutionary biologists say that humans are a restless species and that is what separates us from animals which are content to lie around and do nothing until they're forced to, either because of danger or hunger. Restlessness is what kindles our imagination and imagination is the source of everything any of us do. They say when a person's body decides for him, he turns into an animal and lives only for pleasure. He lacks the moral or aesthetic conscience to differentiate between right and wrong, beautiful and ugly. He is a slave to his bodily whims. And evolutionarily speaking, art, science and philosophy turned into our pursuits only after we started taking our daily need for food and pleasure for granted. The body was satiated, now the mind needed to be engaged. And that is when, apparently, our brain's structured changed from those of apes and our imagination started showing us things that didn't exist. Devdutt Pattanaik, in this brilliant speech, argues how our imagination has a phenomenal power over all our decisions. Almost all our mental pursuits are triggered by the idea of pleasure or pain and those are creations of our brain. We go out of our way to accommodate others, work long hours or adjust ourselves for a loved one simply because we are hoping it is going to give us pleasure later on and all this hardship is going to be worth it or because we are so scared of losing something, that we do whatever it takes just to keep it in our sight. We suffer heartbreak because we imagined someone to be a certain way and they did not end up being that. Like I was just asking Kishore, can I hate someone just because they did not behave according to my expectations? Which is probably why even a totally unexpected good thing is more a shock than a surprise.

Why do we ask questions if not to be entertained? Isn't curiosity just another form of indulgence? There is a little anecdote about Sadhguru which I absolutely love. During one of his discourses, one of his disciples asked him,  "Sadhguru, what is the meaning of life? Why am I alive?" to which Sadhguru smiled, paused, and replied, "One day God was playing with marbles. One marble turned into Earth, another into Sun etc." He then laughed at the incredulous expression on the face of his disciples and said, "You don't believe the story because it is too immature. But if I tell you a more sophisticated story, you will believe it. But how is it going to help you in any way? All you want to be is entertained." I have stopped believing when people say they create art to unravel the truth, or to find the nature of existence. It has now become fashionable to ask the big questions, to seem like an intellectual. I know, that is why I do it too. If I really wanted answers, why would I spend money marketing the film and my time explaining people what I've wanted to achieve. If prancing around naked on streets would give me as much adulation as talking about the meaning of existence does, wouldn't I be doing that? I don't know, maybe all this is wrong. But I know one thing; it is that I don't have to post this, I can keep this draft or even delete this piece because writing it has calmed me down, it has served its purpose. And despite that, I'll post this. To put forth my views, start a discussion, share, improve our knowledge and broaden our horizons. Or simply because I want to tell myself and the world that I'm not wasting away my life. That when my relationships and experiments fail, I have successfully learned a little more about myself. But have I?

On Arranged Marriages

Marriage is a just legal way of having sex and all those who're not capable of impressing a woman on their own, turn towards their parents who pick them up under the pretext of 'Arranged Marriage'. Harsh, prejudiced words, but how else do you start a debate unless you are an extremist yourself. To wake people out of their slumber and have them thinking, to either approve of a claim or retaliate, I need to make a statement. And that is what I want this piece to be- a catalyst to a much needed debate. I want people, some of them I know well, to think about the choices they are making. Why do I give a shit what someone's outlook towards arranged marriage is? Fair enough, but I'm on the verge of becoming a victim of the existing system and I want to fight it.

Why do people marry? The answers I often hear are:

1. Because my parents want me to ( this might actually seem funny but a majority of 23-25 year old heavily educated software employees who do almost everything which their parents disapprove of give me this )

2. Because everyone else is getting married ( this is more of a parental good cop-bad cop routine; one of the parents explains the virtues of marriage and the other pushes and prods by involving peer pressure )

3. Because it is the right thing and we would need someone's company in our old age ( my personal favourite: reminds me of those shitty pension plans which promise you a safe, happy retirement because you're busting your ass now to pay them )

4. Reproduction ( Kishore's the only guy I know blatant enough to say something like this; you want sex and your parents want a cute-grandson-toy to play with and show around )

Almost all the replies I have heard are variation of these four statements. Or, a personal affront: "You are too arrogant to understand this. You will know the day you grow old." What is that even supposed to mean? Why are you converting your shortcomings into a convenient escapist theory? How is it different from saying you do not believe in God because he has not yet bestowed your grace upon you?

"If you can't explain it to a six-year old, then you don't understand it yourself."
            -  Albert Einstein

Ok, since marriage as an institution is another debatable topic and not in the scope of this argument, we'll leave it for some other day. Lets just assume that you have had a happy marriage, your son/daughter wants to get married too because that for him/her is an ideal way to live a life. A personal choice and thus, indisputable.

Imagine you are parent of a 23 year old woman. She's educated, sophisticated, refined, good-looking, well-paid. You want to get her married- that is an action, a symptom. Lets look at the cause behind that action, the thought behind that manifestation. Usually, it is simply because you've grown up in an environment where a 23-year old unmarried woman is a burden and so, almost reflexively, you want to get her off your chest. Either because you think that is ideal, or because of your friends and colleagues and relatives who're getting their daughters married off or, rarely, because your daughter wants to get married herself. So, straight away we can draw a conclusion. That 23 being the ideal age is not God's will. It's a practise we've been following as a society because of reasons physiological, cultural, societal etc. 80-100 years ago, in the same province that we live in now, girls got married as young as 8-year olds. Apparently, the Nizam took any women he wished but with a single clause: he never touched married women. So, simply the need of the hour said that you want your daughter to escape the clutches of a womaniser, you got her married off young. We now look at Balika Vadhu and tut-tut simply because a 10-year old girl is getting married. How is that different from getting a 23-year old married off?

Both of them are arranged marriages, both of them have the support of Grahas and Stars ( I do not want to talk about the validity of Jyothishyam because I have no knowledge of it whatsoever but I personally know marriages that have failed despite the stars aligning perfectly ), in both cases parents think what they're doing is in the best interest of their daughter, in both cases so-called relatives and well-wishers play a huge part ( which is kind of funny because they're the ones who have the least to lose if it goes wrong ) and almost always, the daughter doesn't have much of a say.

Does overwhelming public acceptance make a thing right? Because if it doesn't, I cannot comprehend the immense stupidity of all these people who're walking into an arranged marriage or are prodding others to do the same. I'm digressing. So, yeah, the daughter is shown a photograph. The guy comes home. They talk in the presence of Elders. They're allowed to chat on Facebook and are asked for their responses in a week. Though recently I have heard of a marriage settled two days after they met each other for the first time. I have been a relationship more-or-less for six years and I still find my girl mysterious. Two fuckin' days. What the fuck are you supposed to feel? Vibes, divine voice, soul chemistry. How often is it that we haven't liked someone instantly but soon have realised how simply awesome they are. Or even the other way round. Extremely charming guys turn out to be backstabbing assholes as time passes. What is she supposed to know in 2 days? His likes, his interests, his ambitions. How does that tell me anything about the guy? And isn't it really similar to a job interview process which is so flawed. If you don't trust me, go around and look in Hitec city. Look at the unhappy, depressed Monday morning faces and ask them why they're working for a particular company. A huge majority will jump ship if someone else is paying them higher. Isn't a job supposed to be more about the process than the returns? When the work we do defines who we are and that is probably the one thing most people will know us as, shouldn't we be better equipped than to work for someone just because he bid me for higher than anyone else?

I'm digressing again. Ok, agreed, we can't know a person in 2 days. So, we look at his financial status, his job, where his father works and find more about the family from mutual friends. What does this tell me about the prospective groom? It helps me speculate of what he might be based on this angle. But any man is shaped by a million things and just because he is not really rich, doesn't work either in the Govt. or the Software industry, or his father's not-so-socially known, does all that translate into a bad guy? Which again brings me to the point of good guy vs bad guy. Everyone wants a good guy when what we should ideally be looking for is compatibility. You think your daughter's the sweetest, nicest, cutest woman in the world, like you have a right to, but you don't know her half as much her friends do and 90% as her boyfriend does. And it is not your fault most of the time. It is simply because friends are the only people in the world who identify a person what they exactly are. They are not forced to bear with someone because of a relation of blood or need or social structure. I know my friends most intimately because I walked into them without the burden of expectation. So, yes, maybe if friends picked up grooms rather than parents, we'd probably have more successful marriages. More so because a girl can look at her friends and ask why they're choosing a particular guy. And they're obliged to answer.

Which brings me to another idea of a successful, happy marriage. Isn't it close to defining a happy, successful life? Happy, according to who. Successful, by whose standards. What are the parents looking for in a groom so that their daughter might have a happy marriage? Are they themselves happy about their marriage for them to take up a responsibility to make someone else happy through marriage? What sort of a parent are you when your daughter trembles with fear just to come up to you and talk about a guy she likes? If you cannot have a sensible dialogue with your grown up daughter, who you think is too immature or too stupid to discuss such a serious topic, how the fuck can she be ready for marriage?

Does all this make love marriages better? See, again, we are looking for a single answer to all those complicated questions. A few years ago, tv9 went apeshit covering all love marriages on live television and standing by the decision of eloped youngsters. I'm pretty sure a lot of those marriages are not working too. It is not a question of doing the right thing. For almost everything in life, we act in a certain way with best intentions for our loved ones but end up making such a mess of it. I think it is because we don't communicate. We don't talk. We don't discuss. We don't question. We don't take up responsibility for our lives. I know this girl who is so scared to take up responsibility of her own life for the fear that she might ruin it, that she's simply nodding her head to whatever her parents have to say. If there is one person who knows best in the world, it is herself and if she can't back herself up to stand by her actions, isn't she letting life go without living it? She won't end up with a guy who loves her because it might fail and her parents might hate it but she's ready to walk into a lifeless marriage because when it fails, she can still guilt trip her parents and she won't have to take up any blame.

What exactly is a parent's love? Is it letting your son/ daughter live a life of his/ her own choices and you are there to guide them? Or does it mean you decide for them everything that they have to do because you are standing on the higher pedestal of experience and that you tell them you want only the best for them? Do we, as a society, have a right attributing children's successes or failures to their parents?

I'll finish off now but I want to talk about this. Please leave your views as comments because I know what I'm saying is not 100% right but we'll end up being better people by discussing and looking at things from different perspectives. But before I leave, I'll tell you a true story. I know this man who's daughter eloped four years ago. She married someone in the US and he hasn't spoken to her since that day. Not even when his grandson was born. He has a right to be deeply hurt. But what surprises me is that despite knowing how happy she's with the man of her choice, he still doesn't talk to her. And I realised it one day, when in the middle of another topic, he spoke about how he always wanted get her married so grandly, how he wanted to invite all this friends and colleagues and show them what a mighty son-in-law he managed to rope in etc. that it was never about the woman. Don't get me wrong. It was about his daughter and himself. He wanted the best for his daughter and he wanted to give the best himself but he never really knew the woman. His choice of a groom would have been based on giving the best to his daughter, but not how that man was going to be with this woman. It wasn't his fault. He didn't know any better. Just like my idea of my mother as a mother overshadows almost my idea of the woman she is. But luckily, I don't pretend that I know her best and don't take decisions on her behalf.

If only we'd talk, wouldn't the world be so much of a better place.

on art and the artist

Do we create art? Or does divinity use us just as a vehicle to give the world that piece? Is that piece of art mine, or have I left a part of myself behind in the form of that piece? All I know is that art rises out of conflict. We are in a state of perpetual conflict between what-we-are and what-we-want-to-be and art exudes when that conflict reaches a certain threshold. Why do artists create? Why do they spend lifetimes shut in rooms waiting for inspiration to strike them? I will paraphrase George Orwell here who said that an artist creates for atleast one of the following reasons:

1. Sheer egoism
2. Aesthetic enthusiasm
3. Historical impulse
4. Political purpose

Do we create because we try to prove ourselves, or the world around us, or the future generations of our worth? Are we so scared of oblivion? Is it an inherent quality in us to appreciate beauty and so we make art out of that impulse? Are we trying to make sense of our life and times in the bigger context of life and divinity? Or are we just trying to change the world in a way that it orients itself to the world inside our heads?

"Beauty will save the world"- Dostoevsky

We claim that we are in pursuit of truth. We claim we philosophize to understand the inherent nature of human soul, its ability to differentiate between Good and Bad. But I think we neither care about Truth nor Ethics. Our lives revolve around Beauty. And in that pursuit if we stumble across the meaning of existence, so be it, but even otherwise, we will struggle to create a beautiful world. Or change our idea of beauty till it synchronizes with the state of the world. What is beauty? Is it symmetry, perfection? Why are scientists in search of the Unifying Theory of Everything? Our knowledge of it will not affect nature, or universe, or God, or whatever you wish to call it. We are in pursuit of balance, harmony, singularity because it holds an aesthetic value. We spend our entire lives searching for patterns because patterns are beautiful. Because chaos and disorder are not pleasing, they do not exhilarate us. Even when Jackson Pollock was painting those seemingly erratic paintings, he was in search of order underneath all that chaos. He was waiting for that signal to come deep within him that told him that the piece was complete. It was neither superfluous not wanting, but just right. In balance, in harmony. With who- The artist or nature?

-How do you know when you're finished with a painting?
-How do you know you're finished making love?
        -Pollock (2000)

Scientists are in search of truth. Philosophers are in search of ethics and the meaning of life. Artists are in search of aesthetics. The scientist says, "the world follows a pattern, I just have to discover it." The Philosopher says, "there is a meaning to all this, 'I' exist for a reason and I will reveal it." The artist says, "yes, we are here for a reason and there seems to be a bigger purpose behind all this and while I wait for that to dawn on me, I'll create something beautiful." We call Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground dreadful, Lars Von Trier's Antichrist gut-wrenching but we still explore them because dreadful is beautiful, gut-wrenching is also beautiful. Not in the literal sense ofcourse, but beauty in the broad sense of the word. Appealing, enticing, intriguing. All that is enough motivation for creating art.

But again, what is art? Something that gives us pleasure, that broadens our horizons, that explores the grandeur of life, that teaches us how to live, that lets us enter someone else's soul, that burdens our hearts with infinite possibilities life has to offer? Art, I think, is anything that we want it to be. The shape of a leaf, rain on sea, the rhythm of a drumbeat, the juxtaposition of infinite colours in a rainbow, E=mc^2, Double Helix, Mona Lisa, Mahabharata, Sufi music, a perfectly timed backhand, the last line in One Hundred Years of Solitude. What isn't art? Now, how do we judge it? The good vs the eternal? Public Consensus, Mathematical Symmetry, Astounding Logic, Orginial Combination of parts to create an extremely Different Whole. What makes a Bach so special and another-now-forgotten-18th century musician not so much. How does public appreciation affect the artist? Does a lack of understanding during his time stifle a truly original voice?

Art, as I see it, is a man's response to his life's experiences. It is his way of paying tribute to all those things that have shaped him into who he is. That is probably why artists are voyagers, intellectual, emotional, spiritual. An artist travels to places no one ever has been only to come back and try to relive those experiences, to make sense of all that he's gone through, to tell the world what he's seen and learnt and what his idea of a perfect world is. I don't know what finished product constitutes as art. But I know that its creation makes the artist happy. That he trips with immense pleasure, sometimes the pleasure of pain, while creating it. He creates art only to see it create him all over again. When he finishes a piece of art, he sheds his skin, and all its accumulated experiences, to embrace a new one. The creation of art is what art is all about.

the anand gandhi effect

Memories are phenomenal things aren't they. Lucid, slippery, indefinite. We fill them with stuff we want to, we remember only the ones we wish to look back to and I'm pretty sure we fabricate a few ones. Maybe we can't create new ones out of thin air but depending on our mood at a certain point of time, I'm sure we juxtapose a few unrelated events to create the events we wish had happened. Anyway, honestly, I don't even believe in the linearity of time anymore. Not because of philosophical underpinnings but simply because Deja Vu's happened to me a lot of times. It has to happen. Because your mind's dealing with so much all the time, maybe it hangs up a few times, and unintentionally, it points to the current location and time as something that happened a few lifetimes ago, or recently in a parallel universe, or maybe its you realizing that life's like Groundhog Day.

So, anyway, we've been hearing this shit since we were like kids- Do not do anything to impress anybody or do not live somebody else's life. Well, we can't live somebody else's life and despite knowing that there is a tough story behind the adulation that someone popular receives, don't we, atleast for moments wish to emulate them, hoping that it would lead us to our salvation. Despite repeatedly refuting the notion that external acceptance is important to us, don't all of us crave for widespread adulation and respect. And it is this part of us, I believe, messes up the most with us. Without understanding what is deeply personal to us, what is closest to our hearts, we tend to do things that are triggered by the environment we live in, the world we wish to be a part of. This is probably the reason why so many of our countrymen aspire to be cricketers or film stars. Admitted, they start off with a love for the craft but I'm pretty sure that if established cricketers or movie stars aren't treated like demigods, a lot of the aspiring ones wouldn't be trying so hard.

We want the world to look upto us, to love us, to remember us. But all of us know everybody is busy living their lives. Maybe Tendulkar brightens us up when he takes on Shoaib Akhtar or Shah Rukh Khan temporarily erases our dread when he makes us laugh but after walking out of the theatre or the stadium, we are back to being the protagonist in our lives. Our lives are our movies, and though we have a few important people in our lives, we are more important to ourselves than to anyone else.

Sab ke dimaakh mein picture chal rahi hain. Sab saale hero ban na chah rahe hain apni-apni picture mein. E saala, Hindustan mein jab tak saneema hoga, log chutiye ban tey rahenge 
                                                                                    - Ramadhir Singh in Gangs of Wasseypur II

Like Bob Dylan once said, "I can only be me, whoever that is", is it really possible for us to carve an identity for ourselves without the influence of society, our environment? What are the factors that truly leverage our decisions, our ways of living, our dreams and passions? How much of our identity is hardcoded into us at the time of our birth? Can a child who is a gifted painter turn into an astounding musician when trained and nurtured the right way? Is there anything such as natural talent or is it just the confluence of one man's inherent taste in craft with the mindset and social behaviour of an audience? Is that why genius is often misunderstood at its time and lauded later? Is it why a few people are called "ahead of their times"? Is there anything such as genius or is it just one man's mindset mildly different from a socially accepted norm? If very high IQ is out of ordinary and is considered brilliant, why isn't very low IQ, also out of the ordinary, considered brilliant? Can we even measure beauty, intelligence and righteousness? Why is someone called beautiful and someone else called ugly? Are we born with a sense of what is right and what is wrong? When we fall in love with that person, do we fall in love with that man at that point of time for what he is? If not, then why didn't we love him earlier, or if yes, since he will not be the same person the next moment, will we not love him? If a child is swapped at birth, will an unknowing mother love her foster son like her own one? Is the love between a mother and child because she carried him for nine months, or because the child is a representation of her womanliness, or simply because like somebody once said, "The only reason a mother loves her child so much is because of the friendship they share.From the time of the child's conception to atleast the age of six, the child is perpetually around her. And so she gets so used to the child's presence. Also, because the child is the weakest and loneliest then, the fact that the mother takes care of him builds a sense of gratefulness."? I don't know.

All this is the Anand Gandhi effect. Ever since I saw his interview at TIFF and his TedX talk, I have been mesmerised by that he has to say. So all these questions have been popping into my head. There is so much to know, to understand, to appreciate and yet we live our lives like trained elephants that don't break free of their shackles because they believe they can't. We have been taught to fear the future, fear the world outside, fear the unknown. Maybe that makes sense when we are kids. But we don't walk out of the beaten path even when we're grown up because we've been conditioned to live within boundaries. But boundaries change every generation. Someone has to push them, not for the sake of humanity, but just to satiate curiosity.

straight from the gut

Everyone falls off but it is one's ability to dust it off, get up and prove himself and the world that he's back is what defines a man. A rather romantic notion but not as easy as it may seem. No, dusting off and getting up is the easier part. The harder part is to concede that you've fallen down, to admit that you're not living but waiting for life to happen, to acknowledge the passivity that seeped in, to accept the fact that you're getting so irritated and depressed with the behaviour of people not because they're changing but because you're not able to. Life is so much fun when things are happening. Your confidence is high, people find you charming and funny, your girl admires you and the relationship blossoms, you mother is proud of her prodigious son, you can state your ideas emphatically, your friends love you and you thank god for giving you such a wonderful life. But then, somehow you grow complacent, and things stall. Not in jerks and splutters, unfortunately, but with whines. You think this is temporary, that things will get back to being normal, but they don't. And soon a sense of dread starts to seep in. You find your friends and family unsympathetic. You think they don't understand you, they don't empathize with you. Your work suffers and as guilt seeps in, you can't do what you've always loved doing. You turn self-pitying, sleep for phenomenally long periods. You contemplate on the worthlessness of life, you mock people for going forward, telling them that all this is temporary, that all of us are going to die one day soon. You pretend you don't care what people say about you. You turn away from your girl when she tries to help you, to tell you that things are wrong with you, that you have to change. You have nightmares of her deserting you for a more successful man, of not sticking to you when you needed her most. You feel like the burden of existence is upon you, like you are alone and desolate in the expanse of the world. You cut off whoever is trying to help you. Your family drifts away from you because you don't let them near. You attempt to change things. You start doing things. But none of them work. You're doing all that you can, putting in all your efforts like they told you to, like they promised things would look up when you do. You believe in it, grit your teeth and work hard. But soon enough, the resolve fails. You go back to being a drifter, you try to carve a different career path for yourself. Then you realise that that is hard work too. Your family backs you hoping you'd stick to it. But when you don't, they are disappointed. They don't even show their hurt or anger anymore. They just let you exist. Do not really pay attention. At this point, you don't feel anger too. You know that to earn their respect, to earn your girl's admiration and love, you have to work hard. Prove them that you aren't a loser. But the will to fight already disappeared. Things get only worse and then you get used to it. You don't care about life anymore. You don't revel in small achievements, you don't laugh, you don't mingle, you don't experience. And you begrudge others for doing so. Insecurity and jealousy rule you. You grow cynical. You don't care about the promises you make, you don't trust yourself. Life loses its meaning. It just turns into one day dissolving into the next. You don't remember dates, or events, or anniversaries. People stop talking to you because you make their lives uninteresting. And then you hit the bottom. Pure dullness. You cocoon yourself, like she put it, in your laziness and complacency. Nothing affects you anymore. You think of giving it all up and turning into a Sadhu. Maybe that would bring some meaning to your life, give you a reason to exist. After all, aren't we here to be liberated.

And then one day, in one moment, the smoke clears. One phone call, one post, one look. It changes everything. The smoke seems to be clearing. You start seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. The darkest one you've ever been in. Warmth starts to seep back into you. You don't want to let this moment pass. Your family, your girl are giving you one last chance. You don't want to disappoint them anymore. You muster all your energy and you start running. Its easier than it seems. Now that the will to live, inspire, love and be loved, to change the world have been reignited, things seem to be falling into place. You are not going to let this moment pass. You think of all those who tried to tie you down, who told you that you wouldn't amount to much anyway. You want to prove them wrong. But more than that, you want to prove your mother, your girl that their belief in you was never meaningless. That the man they loved had the guts to reclaim himself. Now is the time to prove them right.

Dharm

Dharm, like it promises to be, is a dissertation on the nature of faith. I call it a dissertation because it is academic in its approach, feels burdened with research and deals with the same things that have been dealt with before. It offers nothing new. I should have anticipated how it was going to end the moment I found out that it had won the Nargis Dutt Award for Best Feature on National Integration. But right after that, when I read that the film's director Bhavna Talwar had lobbied hard for it to be selected as India's official selection for Best Foreign Language Film, I let my raise hopes high. I don't know what made her do that, but seeing the standard of world cinema that gets shortlisted, I'm pretty sure she wouldn't have cleared the long list.

Don't get me wrong, this is not a bad film. But neither is it a great one just because it deals with a subject that is less portrayed in mainstream cinema. Its well crafted, and makes a rather good watch, but that's it. Dharm is the story about a Hindu Purohit, who is steeped into his religion, believes in his faith and is essentially, by all parameters, considered a holy man. He takes pride in his prowess, his abilities, but also is sensible enough to attribute them to the grace and benevolence of his gods. The film meticulously shows us his stature in society, his stoical belief in tradition, his rather conservative views and his relationship with his family. One day, his daughter brings home a baby and after a few unsuccessful attempts to send him away, at the behest of his wife and daughter, he fosters the baby. The next sequence becomes the emotional crux of the film and it is crafted lovingly. How the relationship between the foster son and father deepens is  dwelled upon for long and despite using standard cliches, it becomes a rather endearing passage simply because of Pankaj Kapur.

This film revolves around Pankaj Kapur. The story is about Pandit Chaturvedi, but Pankaj Kapur is so extraordinary in this rather mediocre film, that more often than not, his prowess overshadows the film. I had seen him in Blue Umbrella, and heard a lot about his legendary status among the pantheon of great Indian character actors like Naseeruddin Shah, Om Puri, Nana Patekar but seeing him breathe life into a rather uninteresting, uni-dimensional character is an astounding experience. The film could have done so much more by exploring Pandit Chaturvedi's background and given Kapur more leeway, making his character more than just a plot device. The man packs so much emotion in just the way he looks; the look he gives his wife full of endearment, the look to the kid with pride, looking away from the widow with disgust and that phenomenal 2 second pause in the beginning, when an ascetic tries to talk to him about Dharma, before he smiles, just so mockingly, and turns away saying, "Mahadev". A pity so many of our actors have to resort to looking into the camera and recite their monologues.

Almost every other character is far more under developed and actors are made to recite lines like tape recorders. What is the whole point of casting good performers like Supriya Pathak Kapur and Pankaj Tripathi if you are going to give them lines that sound more like aphorisms and characters that are basically convenient stereotypes. The cinematography though eye-catching initially, soon plays itself out and reminds one of !ncredible india advertisements. The editing is inconsistent, and a few scenes are so oversaturated that they turn painful to the eye. Sonu Nigam's haunting background songs, though, are a solace and work really well at the dramatic junctures.

What is specifically needed to be addressed is the film's climax. I knew what was coming, but prayed otherwise, because despite all its shortcomings, the film seemed to be addressing issues that are shunned in the rest of the country, and I hoped the climax would end on a really high note. But it all ended in a whimper when the religious fundamentalists realised their folly after a one minute speech, quoting the meaning of religion from a dictionary, and telling them that non-violence is the path. When will filmmakers stop dealing with cliches? If they are so unsure of how to end a film, then why pretend that they are dealing with ground reality, when the climax is a simple form of escapism? How is it that people who have been screaming for blood till moments ago stop to listen to somebody they've hated all along, and then realise their mistakes, because he quotes Bhagvad Gita, or tells them that God is one and different religions are different interpretations of the ultimate truth? We live in a complex world, dealing with complex issues then why should we aspire for that simple solution?

Dharm would have been so much more had it chosen to be a brave, honest film, choosing to walk the untreaded path. Instead it is just a pretentious film that wishes to launch its director as a bold, serious filmmaker. I feel sad for Pankaj Kapur because despite his world-class acting, the film goes nowhere. The film is a decent watch but it leaves us the moment it ends.

On editing films and writing bad reviews

Editing Rooney Bowling Fans Association was crazy fun. Yes, it was tedious because I had to sit down for about 6 hours to make a 4 and a half minute video, but the pay-off was huge. Most importantly, I fell in love with it, the song serendipitously syncing perfectly with the visuals. And the text on screen doing things I didn't consciously choose to make happen. Yes, the uploaded video seemed of a really low quality, but despite that it was a juicy, fast-paced video. See, despite not wanting to come off as conceited, I can't help but rave about it. I well and truly fell in love with it. It also helped that I learned quite a bit of Magix Movie Edit Pro 2013 Premium and it seems hell lot of a easier software to work with than Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 with which I had worked during the making of Based on a True Story. Talking about Based on a True Story, I sat down and finished half the subtitles for the film. Took quite a bit of time but felt good revisiting the movie. I'm pretty sure Spanish and Iranian film aficiando's will not stumble upon and be disappointed with the lack of subtitles but I wanted to make up for the bad re-recording. A lot of people complained that they couldn't hear anything at all in a few places and I thought it'd be cool to have subtitles for my first movie. So, working on it. Should upload it on Youtube by tomorrow.

I've been working on a couple of screenplays, a sequel to Based on a True Story, a one minute Black and White short with Ankith and another serious, intense drama/thriller where I want Kaushik to play the lead. Things are looking bleak in terms of implementation but I'm getting the screenplays ready. Maybe it'll work out, maybe it won't with them, but I want to be ready with my screenplays. Also, thanks to Vasishta, I got in contact with the founder of a website called CityMirrors.com. We spoke for a long time and I liked his vision, what he was trying to do with the website. So, I told him I'd love to write about films for the website and he seemed to like my blog too. So, I went down to watch the remake of Delhi Belly called Crazy today and published the review. Sravani said that it was a really bad review because it reeked of indifference and I spent more time talking about Delhi Belly than Crazy, which seems to me, now in hindsight, to be true. I tried covering up by saying that the film was so mediocre that it couldn't inspire me into writing well, for which she retorted, truly again, that anybody could write well about a good film. The reason people turn to critics and reviewers is because they can write well about both good and bad films, thereby letting the audience know why something is good and something else isn't. Couldn't refute with that. Reminded me of what Rajeev Masand once said about critics. He said that all critics, to begin with, are good writers and they use their skills to write about the thing they are most passionate about, books, music or films. I don't remember if it was Masand or Raja Sen. It was in this interview. Check it out. Great one.

That's it for now really. Also, I forgot, we had been planning to do a review of a new release every Friday and revisit a foreign film, a modern classic, every Wednesday. I'm really excited about doing it. Just a catch that I have no idea how I'm to find tickets every Friday for the release of the week. That's about it then.

Later.

Gone Baby Gone

Gone Baby Gone is a bold film. Not just for its subject, but also for the way it chooses to deal with it. A 4 year old kid called Amanda has been kidnapped. The media has taken an interest and the Police have spent two days with no leads. The lost kid's aunt then approaches two small time private detectives, Patrick Kenzie and Angelo Gennaro, because they know the neighbourhood and will not scare off prospective witnesses. Kenzie wants to take it up, but his lover and associate Gennaro, is against it. She doesn't want to get involved in a case that has the possibility of ending with the molested corpse of a 4 year old. But she concedes when she finds the aunt inconsolable.

They get into the procedural, finding better prospects than the police because they know the people of the locality who are willing to confide into them, rumour and gossip, what they will not to the police. And like Col. Hans Landa puts it so evocatively in Inglourious Basterds, "Facts can be so misleading, but rumours, true or false, are often revealing." So, they pitch the knowledge they've gathered from one source to another to either confirm the statement or to negate it. What they seem to be doing is take a public consensus to verify the if facts are really facts. The family of the abducted child is a mess, her mother a coke addict, and they stumble upon a likely suspect and reason for the kidnap. Their investigation gets them into mild trouble, and they seem to be hitting the right notes, because soon enough, Captain Jack Doyle and Detective Sergeant Remy Bressant, get a warning call from the likely abductor. A trade off is suggested and the detectives, with the police, reach the spot with ransom.

Till here, the movie is rather predictable, if not dull, but as a shootout ensues and the girl is feared to be killed, the point at which the detectives and consequently movie is expected to move on, here Affleck, the director, truly enters. He grabs a case that's slipped away, a film that's already past its dramatic high, and then turns it into a spectacular second half where characters' true motivations are revealed, where nothing is what it seems to be and it becomes increasingly hard to differentiate between good and bad, right and wrong. The twists and turns in the plot are not just narrative devices but revelations that we see through the eyes of Patrick who seems to be obsessed with the case and is walking deeper into danger every passing moment. The screenplay is astounding, because while it creates tension and works really well on a purely cinematic level, the story deserves this approach.

Who are good men and who are not, why they act in some ways and what are the reasons behind their actions, Affleck treads into slippery ground, gently but assuredly because he knows how good his actors are and how powerful his story is. The characters that we begin by despising and the others by admiring, switch sides to and fro, and by the end it boils down to not why people acted the way they did but how the repercussions of their actions are affecting others' lives. Everybody hates child molesters, people who abuse children and that is the easier part. But in as complicated a world as ours, it is harder to pinpoint why those people act the way they do, their motivations and intentions hazy, and how do we find a right solution for the problems that we, as a society, have gotten ourselves into.

The premise is important. The plot, well etched. Acting is top class and the direction, steady. This is a very powerful film from Affleck. I liked his Argo, though I found his style too cold and distant for the dramatic script, this is perfect material for his sensibilities. And though one is reminded regularly of Eastwood's style of direction, maybe more so because he directed another one of Dennis Lehane's haunting stories in Mystic River, Affleck has an interesting way of getting us to think. A great watch.

Farewell then, Ebert

It came as a mild shock to me when I logged onto Facebook today morning to find tributes to Roger Ebert. RIP Ebert. There was no sinking feeling in the stomach, like it was when I learnt about the deaths of Steve Jobs and Peter Roebuck, probably because Ebert was old and visibly ill, but I will miss him more palpably. I don't really remember when I discovered Ebert's site but it didn't take me long to realise that I had found a goldmine. Just the magnitude of the archives made me gasp. This man had reviewed films for 46 years, covering an unprecedented number of film reviews, 306 was apparently his highest in one calender year, not to mention his revisiting of classics for the newer generation of film audience to appreciate.

Ebert loved film. It was right on the surface. And he was a very good writer in his own right. He escalated film review to an art form, winning the first Pulitzer for a film reviewer in the process, and imbibing into millions of readers like me the craft of watching and appreciating film. Just a few days after I discovered him, it became a habit of mine, more of a motor-reflex thing, as soon as I'd heard of a movie, to punch in the keywords, 'Roger Ebert review' and trust the man blindly. It is actually a testimony to his love for movies because more than 90% of the time when I googled his film review for a more or less acclaimed film, I found it. He watched them all.

Ebert had a phenomenal eye for talent, especially young, indie filmmakers who had an original voice. He wagered his word on directors like Scorsese, Tarantino, Soderbergh, Aronofsky while they were still blips on the film circuit. It is partly thanks to him that their careers are where they are today because viewers like me trusted his judgement and made an effort to give them a chance. Ebert's reviews are lessons for aspiring filmmakers, critics and film buffs. Unlike the cheap, so-called-reviews, that give away the plotline and dissect the movie into various departments, rating them individually, his reviews treat a film as a whole. More like a fully functional, breathing entity that has its own pulse, mood and tempo. When he didn't like a film, he was honest about it. Witty and tongue-in-cheek in an effort to downplay its worthlessness. But when he liked a film, or thought the director had potential, he was effusive in praise. He never held back, but was always polite. He didn't talk about actors, he talked about acting. He lived films, but never more than life.

In an age when film reviews are bad pieces of literature where people care only about stars or gossip, Ebert's was the one voice that treated a film with respect, love and awe. There are quite a few internationally acclaimed reviewers, whose views are respected, Travers, Lane, Zachenek, Denby, but they intellectualize films too much for my liking. In their effort to show off they encyclopedic knowledge, they come off as too haughty or unapproachable. Ebert, on the other hand, reviewed each film for what it was. Yes, he made comparisons, unraveled subtexts, and quoted other artists, but he gave every film a chance. A chance for it to grow on him, to surprise him, to suck him in and to inspire him. And that reflected in every one of his reviews. He sympathized with bad films but lashed at lazy ones. He revered originality, ostracized cliches. Was a film's most vocal supporter when he found potential but also it's harshest critic when it was mediocre.

Ebert, atleast as it seemed to me, believed that a film was a director's medium. He talked about acting, and other technical departments, like music, cinematography and editing, but always came back to trying to understand the director's vision. He loved films that were personal, idiosyncratic, kinetic and visceral. And the ones that had rich background stories lurking beneath the surface. Not that he didn't like other films, he was far too in love with them not to like even the worst of them, but I thought he enjoyed movies that were brimming with life. And he also had a great weakness for well written dialogue, writers like Allen, Schrader, Sorkin, Tarantino, who created weird characters and put phenomenal words in their mouths. Oh, this guy loved films.

Thank you Ebert for leaving us with so much to cherish. I will miss your reviews for the films you will never see and I will remember you every time I come across a film that you might have liked. But mostly, I will miss you for the conversations I had with you every time I read a review of yours. You have taught me how to watch films and learn from them. For that, and for all the hours we've spent discussing films, I'll always be grateful.

Always,
an EbertFan.