Change is cruel for a reason
Cinema teaches us a lot of things and how to live is one of them. Some of the lessons we draw from our favourite movies stay with us for the entirety of our existence. When Marlon Brando scratched his cheek and mentioned an irrefutable offer, he was talking directly to the businessman in each one of us. Every single day, we are either dealing with something or getting dealt by somebody: business involving money, business involving emotions, business involving time and space. Yet, when Godfather delivered that dialogue, we pretended as if we understood what he was saying. Just like we nodded our heads when Anand urged us to ensure that our life is badi (big) and not lambi (long). I consider myself a student of films and never have I once reached a point where I could decipher this medium at one go. This is why I felt I wasn’t being absolutely honest with myself while writing a movie review. A movie takes months, and in some cases, years, to build. It’s only fair that it’s not appreciated or dismissed within a few hours. How you view a movie changes with time. As you grow, the movie grows too, and in some cases, on you.
1990s can easily be called out for churning brainless Bollywood movies. If the ’80s was mediocre, then ’90s hit the jackpot in disaster. Forget the template comedy films, even those belonging to action and drama seldom did their homework. Thankfully, the breath of fresh air was around only due to courageous directors like Mani Ratnam and Mahesh Bhatt. Otherwise, there was little to no surprise on the big screen. To this day, I am amazed how Hum Aapke Hai Koun got away with 14 songs and a runtime of close to 3.5 hours. Not to forget David Dhawan’s №1 series which got lamer over years and Akshay Kumar’s Khiladi franchise that had very little to do with storyline and more to do with his overhyped stunts. However, my all-time fave fail from the ’90s has to be that swimming pool scene from Chachi 420 (1997). Kamal Haasan’s character throws his onscreen daughter into the water after a fire accident and the doctor applauds his/her quick thinking. Which was incorrect on so many levels — the chlorine present in the swimming pool can only make the young kid’s burned skin worse.
We all know of elders who are the first to ask you, without any shame, how much you earn. Not very long ago I used to get embarrassed about such (extended) family conversations. Not anymore. I’ve understood the mindset behind such casual queries. Perhaps the older generation ask the relatively younger generation’s salaries because they belong to an era where salary wasn’t a top secret. Everybody knew what everybody else made. Unlike today, where salary is the equivalent of password, there once was a time where people saw salary as a means to get through life, not a memorial to construct around a number. Anyway, when we are being secretive about our earnings — unless you are in a business which demands you to avoid taxes — we are doing our employer a favour, not each other.
I read a lot. (I wish I wrote a lot too but the truth is, I don’t write as much as I think I should.) Reading comes naturally to me. Just like my typing speed, my reading speed is top-notch. Zero modesty about these skills honed over years. For the record, my actual reading started when I was in sixth standard. My tutor encouraged me to read newspapers and that habit got stuck. With time, I learnt that the only way to retain what I read was to make notes. It’s been over 20 years since I picked up this trait and hasn’t changed at all. To this day, I make notes of the tiniest interesting stuff I read from various sources. Think of them as the fodder for my useless-trivia-of-the-day series on Instagram and weekend quizzes on Zoom.
Speaking of reading, it’s amazing how exhaustive religion is as a topic. Poetry ends after a while and appears reductive. Religion, on the other end, remains fascinating. Mix faith with civilization and what you get is a sesame of human behaviour. You’ll get to acknowledge that humans, by design, were pretty much the same everywhere irrespective of climate and geography. The tenets of religion varied with the passage of time but the specter of culture ruled. To give you an example, popular Abrahamic religions (Christianity, Islam and Judaism) today pretend to be different from each other but their cultural core is pretty much the same. If you assume that Islam is orthodox (read: intolerant), then all you need to do is step a bit back in history and notice how ridiculously orthodox Catholicism used to be, and before that, the same could be said about the Rabbinical order. The only reason we don’t read this in everyday analysis is because of the intellectual arrogance the West ails from. Like my brother, an assistant professor of subjects like political science and mass media, often likes to say, “Ignorance has been a virtue of the Western civilization since time immemorial.”
Change is mostly painful. People cry in each other’s shoulders because they are afraid of what lies ahead. They don’t wish to let go. However, they forget, in that moment, how the lego of their life is based on the desire to change. Strange, isn’t it? You want to change yourself but don’t want things to change. I won’t call myself a nomad (yet) but the possibility of newness scares me not because it’s steeped in mystery but because I am too attached to my yesterday. How difficult it is to abandon the comfort of what is than to work upon what could be!
If you are expecting, ensure that you name your child right. Put in an extra thought about the word. Why? Because the poor thing is going to be stuck with it for their entire time on this wretched planet. It must mean something to you and by extension, it will mean something to the child (someday, hopefully). But if you are going to go by the lousy trends and add unnecessary syllables to a noise, then you are doing grave injustice to yourself as well as your offspring. My favourite couple are these super-patient parents who waited for more than a decade and finally had a daughter named Prateeksha. Close second are the parents who named their twins Ateet and Bhavishya.
Nature’s primary job is to keep the living spirit in us… well.. alive. Without life, nature collapses. Extinction takes place on a daily basis and regardless of the death toll, life succeeds every single time. The victory of the living is temporary but it reinforces in the world that without life, there is no death. All the elements of nature that dance to the tune of the energy have one thing in common: they move on. From the rivers to the dew to the wind to the breeze, everything moves. And they do it with only one purpose. Think about it. The clouds move not because they have to be somewhere for lunch. They do so only to make us feel alive. Deads don’t get to enjoy the altering shapes of a cloud.
Whenever you feel low, remember that the earliest pillow was made up of stone. Yes, you read that right. For some reason, our ancestors thought it was a great idea to sleep with their nape resting on a slab of rock. It was much much later that they understood the benefit of feathers. If you thought that the Naga tribesmen were being silly for hoisting hornbill feathers on their head, you have no idea how much avian softness meant to our ancestors. What I am trying to point out here is our sheer dependency on what we think we need. At one point of time, it was a stone pillow. As of today, it’s a pillow propped up by exquisite feathers.
Before I get unnecessarily sentimental, this is going to be my last blog post from the glorious city of Gurgaon. Me and my wife and our old dog will be leaving soon for Mangalore. Our plans are minimal, to say the most, but we hope things work out, to say the least. Anyway, this is the longest I’ve stayed in a city that isn’t Mumbai. In all fairness, Gurgaon has been nice to me. I may not have geographic landmarks to look back upon but I am happy that I made a few but very tight friends within a short period of time. Even though the distance between us will change from a few minutes to over 2500 km, I hope we continue to feel about each other the way we do right now. After all, what is the point of companionship if it can’t stand the test of isolation?
