We thank you for the questions
You know something created is deeply good when, firstly, you wonder what questions someone was trying to explore, and answer, and secondly, when you are left with a whole bunch of questions that had never occurred to you before the encounter, and many new unanswered ones.
That expansiveness, opening, broadening and not being closed up by pre-canned answers makes for an exceptional experience — a vital learning one.
I have used movies often to help students with Systems Literacy. When one does not have the option of field work, films can be good proxies to study and understand society.
The films I have used are rich objects, because they have been made after much thought, and it shows.
Like any good designer, a film-maker does a lot of research, before creating an offering — an offering that is simultaneously an understanding and insight and a point-of-view.
Underlying the work, are the critical questions one begins with, the questions that show up during the inquiry, and the questions that one has yet found no answers to, but the time has come to share with the world in a cinematic form.
The ultimate product is not a display of knowledge or the hubris of complete understanding, but an incomplete synthesis, still open, and an invitation to a conversation — with the film maker, the audience, and for the viewers to take back into their lives for ongoing search in conversations with themselves.
Of the films you have seen recently, ask yourselves, which have left you wondering about these facets — this rich world of questions and the impact of engaging you in questioning. When have you left the theater with a richer portfolio of questions and an invitation to make your own understanding of things that matter.
I saw one such film yesterday — Goldfish. Made by Anurag Kashyap, it had Deepti Naval and Kalki Koechlin in it. I have just spent some time deconstructing it — it took me far beyond the superficiality of the basic frame. I loved it when watching — I love it even more now.
Questioning is the negentropy of life — answers are the punctuation marks of closed ends, the delimiters of living.
We thank you for the questions.
