Seeing Things

I watched 23 movies in a span of 7 days at the 22nd international film festival of Kerala last month in Trivandrum. The theme was identity and displacement. I ended up watching some of the finest movies made on the subject, in the last year, from across the world.  In the end, I realised with greater conviction that people are the same everywhere. The human race in it's entirety is a victim of prejudice/hatred/suspicion/intolerance. Most people are plain humans who, given a chance want peace and harmony and to love and to laugh. Women everywhere in the world are battling hypocrisy and struggle to be seen as humans instead of women. "Women" being fragile creatures on whom the "honour" of "decent" society lies.  The films that flash before my eyes as I write this are, L'insulte (French, Arabic; dir: Ziad Doueiri), Ava (Pharsi; dir: Sadaf Foroughi), Oh!Lucy (Japanese; Dir: Atsuko Hiranayagi), Une saison en France (French; Dir: Mahamet Sale...

31 Dec 2015 Time to take stock of the year gone past. It's been the most craziest, most eventful year of my life so far. And mine has not exactly been an uneventful life. I have witnessed highs and lows of all kinds. The lesser said the better. I will refrain from making this a 'taking stock of my entire life'. Exactly a year ago, I woke up to the news of the demise of a great individual. Whose qualities are deeply entrenched in me and play an important role in forming the best part of who I am. My grand father. Two weeks hence, I travelled to Dubai to perform in 2 plays as part of the Gulzaar festival at the Ductac. The plays are called "sunte ho" and "arey o henry".  In March, I travelled to Ras Al Khaima, to shoot the first schedule of a Hindi feature film, I bagged a role in. Film called "Airlift" slated to release on 22 Jan 2016. On March 29th, I made a come back to the advertising industry after a year's hiatus as senior plan...

In the last week of August, I walked into a jazz club in Chicago called the Green Mill. It was my last night in the city. I had been there along with two of my colleagues on an official meeting for 4 days. At the end of the 3rd day, we finally got the time to head out without the worry of 8am meetings. I expected to have a lot of fun. Any place that plays live jazz and serves cocktails is a sure shot recipe for it. What I did not expect was to meet Reese. Reese started talking to me with a joke. A sarcastic one. A Chandler Bing kind of joke. Just the kind of joke that gets me tickled. I quickly checked him out from the corner of my eye, (you know, in a way that the other can't tell that he's being checked out. Not sure how good I am at that kind of thing but yeah that was the attempt) and decided to crack a joke back. (Yes, he looked nice enough for that) As an appreciator of good jokes, I know my jokes weren't so good but he laughed. Needless to say, we got along. Nex...

The Theory of Everything is an inspirational film. It inspires you to never allow anything to bog you down in your endeavors. But, the film is not so much about science as it is about love. The Theory of Everything helped prove some of my own theories. On love and relationships. Not that I have ANY credentials whatsoever to be commenting on love but here goes:   1) Love* triumphs everything.  If you love each other, nothing can come in the way. Not poverty, not alcoholism, not distance, not personality differences, not physical disability, nothing. We fool ourselves in blaming such things for our break-ups. My theory is that the reason for wanting a break-up is simply an inadequate give and take of love. Because mutual love can triumph over any issue.  2) Love* just happens.  Hence, it is effortless. You can not decide to love someone. Neither can you instruct someone to love you. My theory is that love* is inevitable and is effortless. (spoiler alert) We d...

This post is to discuss not the film but the subject of the film. It is as I watched the scene where a scientific breakthrough was inter-cut with glimpses of Ganesha and the soundtrack of one of my favourite aartis -jaidev jaidev mangal murthi..that I began to hear the first alarm bells go in my head.  Hawaizada is not just an untold story of an unsung hero.  The untold story would be that a man called Shivkar Bapuji Talpade existed who dedicated his life to building a flying machine at the same time as the Wright Brothers and many others across the world did.  But this film takes the liberty of proposing that  recorded history is wrong. That  Shivkar Bapuji Talpade  happens to be the man who invented the world's first manned aircraft and he did it with the help of our Vedas.   Hawaizada represents a fragment of the extreme nationalist right wing thought-process and it's  entry into the mainstream and THAT is something we need to aw...

1) Feminists hate men Feminism is not the exact-opposite of what male-chauvinism is. It is not a system that pits womankind against mankind. Although it does question why people as a whole are referred to as 'mankind'. But please mind that the point of raising the question is not to change the term to something neutral but just to make a point that history has second-graded women in general. Feminism is about acknowledging this truth and endeavoring to be fair going forward. Feminists do not deny that men and women are made different. A woman has the gift of childbirth, for example. A man is gifted with greater muscular strength than the average woman. Sure. But, the mind, the personality, and the emotions of people are not gender dependent, never mind the stereotypes. There are men who make great mothers. There are women who make great car drivers. There are men who like to shop, preen and gossip and no they need not be gay. There are women who dislike shopping and birthday p...

The pursuit of happiness has many forms. Today I got a call from Teekamgarh. Teekamgarh is a village in Madhya Pradesh. A village I visited a few days ago. A village I would ordinarily have no reason to visit ever in my life. Neither do I have anything personal to do with the village nor is it a tourist hot spot. But, I visited Teekamgarh a few days ago and got irrevocably connected to it. I realised today that, when I placed that little bit of paper with my phone number in Sankhy's tiny hand, I had also placed a little piece of my heart there. 12 yr old Shikha and 10 yr old Sankhy were the younger sisters of 19yr old Anju didi, who became a Jain saadhvi(nun) on the 14th of October. That means that on that date, Anju didi sacrificed everything - wealth, beauty, relationships, temptation, her budding youth and even her name, 'Anju' to take up a frugal life of meditation and prayer to propagate Jainism. In the pursuit of Moksha - eternal happiness, she would disown he...