Against all.

There are times you find yourself against all, all of them and you have every valid reason to be so. Such times are even more painful than those having of emptiness of nothingness. There are times you fail to relate to people uniformly, its not that you fear them or they fear you but the basic laws of gravity defy itself and you fail to attract or get attracted. This of tremendous consequence because coldness begets itself in a big way. You tend to do things that are not unique but those that have the maximum inertia. The will or desire to do stuff keeps you going but then you realize that 'that' doesn’t work for you, your power of thinking is in all time high, but you think of nothing more than nothing. The conscious self struggles hard to get out of it generating a nauseating discomfort. Even best of things show horror of being shallow and act of following them looks an act of phenomenal stupidity. You want to write to express but like always ideas flutter making sounds of banality. You think that you have done it all and seen it all, why again the same thing, I want some new discomfort to experience. All newness seems to deconstruct in same atomic pain. Things go hazily microscopic and stay that way. You see life and people from the bleakest of perspective and get the expected in return. The world is waiting for you to do a comic act and you fail to make them laugh. Go off the stage!

Can you arrest an idea ?

'Certainly so' is gradually on the verge of extinction from dictionary, at least mine. Nothing is certain in a helplessly certain way. See I am not certain what I am writing and what does it suppose to mean or what am I going to babble in the next line. In all such types of posts interests dwindles down exponentially and you drag yourself from paragraphs to lines to words. I almost termed it 'lack of creativity' in my mind and then I just thought it 'right' to blame a more distant thing like 'lack of inspiration' because 'lack of creativity' directly refers to 'lack of talent' which hits so hard somewhere. These type of ideas flash in your mind corrupt you and are gone in no time. But I must say that I am not sure whether they come like this or am I rationalizing my bad self and blaming it all on some damn idea.

From now on the struggle starts to go to a new paragraph and say something fakely interesting that may cover it up. BTW rationalizing is one of the top ten things I hate and quite fortunately I myself missed the list. Not that I am happy about it but just relieved to know that 'that' level is yet to come. See here I again goto rationalizing and repeatedly loose some left-over credibility in my own eyes. And this top ten list has a surprise entry,that is coherency, its probably not the coherency that I hate but the fact that it is so over-rated bugs me and all the more people confuse it to consistency. When we are ever changing, how can we see the coherency and comment on its basis. People find themselves almost static figure and judge everybody else. Guess what tops the list. Its judging, its more because of the fact that I hate being judged by anyone including myself. I find interviews and appraisals brutal gang rapes. Judging becomes all the more problematic when people rationalize it to analyzing. This top ten list is very dynamic probably to a level of my nature and behavior and I am not really sure to put some of the things in there or reject them on benefit of doubt.

See this has come to a point that every sentence need to be squeezed out of you and the truth of voice is long lost and you try to steer yourself with one good sentence that can give you enough thoughts to go to at least next line. Actually to be true there are almost innumerous thoughts right now. of all those, I try to search for the ones that can fit here and can give some more thoughts in returns. This soul searching and writing based on that becomes too manipulated to be any near to you. Since thoughts are essentially random and you 'want' to write something less random than that, you end up messing up the innocence of young thoughts, you polish them till they shine to cover up the fakeness of your effort.

Now its time to wind it up, once you realize this, you try to end it up, cut it short and again 'find' something that can summarize the 'idea', but here again you screw up because there is no idea, there are ideas. Now you think OK, lets give some vague, sometimes anti-climactic ending, and surprise the readers. There is certainly some big difference between generation and creation. The problem here is you think more about how to write and what to write and don't respect the brilliant sparks of ideas that hits your neurons. You wait till the ideas take a form and it usually ends up deforming them. Mind is too hard to capture !

What I have seen ?

Its a long time since I have written about movies, the last one was Cries and Whispers almost 2 weeks back. Though I have seen lot of movies after Cries and Whispers but I wasn't able to gather some time to write about them. Some of them are:

Hour of the Wolf
The Passion of Anna
Contempt
Pulp Fiction
Fight Club
Annie Hall
Life of Brian
Y Tu Mama Tambien
Aviator
Finding Neverland

The first two movies are by Bergman and both have what I like about Bergman, giving importance to characters and the their minds and hearts over plot or external documentary. Hour of the Wolf is a horror movie by Bergman and The Passion of Anna is again about relationships and the permanency and transience of human nature. Contempt was my first encounter with Jean-Luc Godard and it was an exercise to get what French New Wave was. The movie starred Brigitte Bardot, 60s sex siren. I was not able to fully appreciate and understand the movie and new wave until I watched the commentary and some discussion between Godard and Fritz Lang ( Director of German Classic 'M', he also starred in Contempt) in Special features. Other movie DVD where I really enjoyed the special feature was L'aaventura and it had some great essays on acting, movie making by Michelangelo Antonioni. Pulp Fiction was a re-watch and a real treat to senses. Fight Club was a real discovery, I fully enjoyed this movie. Annie Hall is classic Woody Allen, much on the lines of Manhattan. Life of Brian is again an excellent satire and subtle comedy. Y Tu Mama Tambien is like semi-intellectual Mexican Pie. I didn't like Aviator that much, I don't know what was the fault but it was hard to sit through the second half. Length of movie has never been a problem with me but when you see the an enervating attempt to show a thing and failure of the effort, you feel miserable. Anyway I am not fan of biopics or DiCaprio, but Kate as Kate was really brilliant. Surprisingly I liked Finding Neverland. With time I am not able to digest any mush in movies but I enjoyed Neverland probably because is of a child in me, he came out of coma for sometime.

There were some movies that I saw before Cries and Whispers that I didn't mention in the blog.

Red
Fallen Angels
About Schmidt
Office Space
Manhattan
Sade
Lock Stock and two smoking barrels
Lost in Translation
Fargo
The Dead Zone

Red is one of the best movies I have seen in recent times, provocative and life affirming, After this I am planning to see more of Krzysztof Kieslowski. Fallen Angels is much like Chungking Expess, but not that impressive, although the cinematography is very innovative. I loved About Schmidt mainly because of the brilliant portrayal of Schimdt by Jack Nicholson. Office Space's first half is good but second half doesn't live up to the expectations. Manhattan is a great work by Woody Allen. Sade is potently disturbing but not fully convincing. Lock Stock is good but Guy Ritchie did much better job in Snatch. Lost in Translation is just beautiful. I liked Fargo but not to a level that some of my friends rate it. The Dead Zone is first movie by David Cronenberg and it was good mainly because of brilliant Christopher Walken, I think he is brilliant in what ever he does, remember his cameos in Pulp fiction and Annie Hall.

This is pretty much the movie experience I am having these days. I am planning to write about some of them in detail. One movie I really want to write about is Red.

A Picture

Experiences are not a part of life, they pretty much make the life. The experiences that we undergo are like painting a picture, stroke by stroke, day by day. May be we will not be able to complete the picture in life time but its all we earn in a life time. The picture may be a true rendition of our experiences and their effects or it may be processed to look prettier or more acceptable to the popular standards. We paint this picture all the time and this picture makes the basis of any other experiences and tells us how to paint the next experience. This is not to overemphasize the importance of experiences, but to understand them as a 'tool' that carve things as the way they appear to us.

There are 'some of the times', 'some of the persons', 'some of the experiences' we want to stay with us forever, even if we are dead sure that this is not the case and we have to let them go, but latter we realize that those things stay with us, and those memories help us understand life better. Same is the case with bitter experiences, they also stay with us and form a part of us. It is to say that any experience contributes to the full picture. Not to say, we need to hurry up and gain lots of experiences to paint the picture fast to complete it. This will mar the picture totally, we need to experience every moment neatly to paint the picture. The truth of the picture is what matters not the resolution or the canvass or the fullness. This picture need not be pretty but it needs to be beautiful and its all depends on how you define beauty.

This picture is not a like assembling the pieces of a jigsaw puzzles where we have all the blocks available beforehand but here we have all the missing links and its on us, how we fill in the details based on our experiences. Each experience will change the picture slightly or add new details. Each experience will remove some fuzziness and add some more. Your picture of life will have a deep imprint of your true self, the deeper the better. This picture which starts as a picture of others ends up becoming picture of you. The way you see others is the way you think people may be seeing you and the strokes that you apply on the picture are essentially your traits, the nuances of you. You can never remove the painter's image from his creation, and it is not right to see both as separate entities.

Your picture of world is a picture of your experiences being a part of it for some time. This is what you are free to do, to make a rich beautiful picture that you may be proud of when your little time here is over.

Looking Back...

This is what we can technically call a half-yearly appraisal. I hate writing appraisals like any one of you, anyway who wants to judge oneself, it should better be restricted to movies and other peoples, its lot more interesting that way. But I think I should do a small appraisal and a small award ceremony for my blog. Seems so self-obsessed, ya I am!

Six months ago, I started my blog and wrote some philosophizing stuff, some memoirs, some anti-self-help stuff and some other things, but in the later half it moved mainly to movies with one or two personal posts here and there. Some of the friends stopped reading my blog after that transition, but some new joined the club. The question is that does it matter how many people read your blog, I thinks it matters. Not to a limit that I expect comments on each post but I do like comments, some of the comments are really comprehensive and resonating to what you feel.

Now what I feel of my blog. One thing is obvious, I donot feel great or that sort. Its an average stuff. I have recieved lots of reactions for my blog, some are really horrifying as they declared my blog is a self-help stuff (I felt really bad, then I realised the dangers of expressing yourself in public and not able to do so properly), some were really sensible comments which were honestly critical. Other were satirical suggestions like why don't you change its name to 'Look Who's Watching', as blog transformed into movie mouthpiece.

Now the *much waited* awards ceremony. This is like being Javed Aktar and getting all the nominations, I was never so sure that I will win !

And the Nominations are:

Best post:
Desire
Loss of Innocence
Travis Bickle
Opposite of Love
Life

Best Movie Review
La Strada
Wild Strawberries
Cries and Whispers
L'avventura
Wings of Desire

Best Satire ( I haven't written much in this catergory, I think all that I wrote got nominated)
The Art of Procrastination
I'm such a loser
The Art of Mass Songs
Amusement in crap

Best Memoir (Same as the Satire category, not much stuff written here too)
School Time Friends
About Teachers
Back from home
Last Days

and here are the awards...

Best post : Travis Bickle (Some of friends mailed me about who's is Travis)

Best Movie Review: Wild Strawberries ( I liked this movie too much, thats why I like the review too)

Best Satire : I'm such a loser (I felt vindicated when one or two people googled for self-help stuff from Shiv Khera and found my blog)

Best Memoir: School time friends (I recently met Neelu, she is getting married)

Now the awards for the worst...

Worst post: Pain ( It was really painful to write it and after I wrote it, I got a comment that your blog is self-help which scared me. I seriously think and feel guilty of making the beauty of pain look formulative and unpleasurable)

Worst Movie Review: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (I have done a great disservice to a great movie, I revealed the plot so stupidly, please donot read it)

And now the readers choice award
Most Googled post :
Listen this... (Thanks to Rabbi Shergill)


And it ends here and as usual I don't feel good after evaluating what I write because I feel it should be left to those who read but as of now my immediate fear is that this post might not win any raspberry awards !

Wings of Desire

When the child was a child,
It didn't know it was a child.
Everything was full of life,
And all life was one.

One of the most true works of art will not ask you any questions directly but will touch something within you that will let you ask questions to yourself. Its like seeing a carefree child all happy riding his bicycle and you asking yourself 'What is this joy? or where is that joy now?'. Wings of Desire do exactly the same. Wings of Desire is a life-affirming tale that celebrates mortality. There is no cry for maturity or logic but a heart-felt whisper to be child again.

Wings of Desire is a tale of two Angels Damiel and Cassiel hovering over city of Berlin and experiencing/witnessing the life of mortals, viewing their everyday problems and joys, listening to their inner thoughts passively for eternity. They see Berlin with all its noise, parents lamenting children, women having labor pains, self-loathing people committing suicides, old people going nostalgic about old days. They have seen it all. They don't react too much. But long for this pleasure, this pain.

Damiel confides in Cassiel about his dissent over this and not experiencing any real joy, joy of saying a surprising 'Oh' rather than all-know 'Yeah', joy of blackening his fingers with morning newspapers , joy of feeding a cat, joy of basic colors of human emotions.

But unlike Damiel, Cassiel is more content to just witness. Of all the persons he observes, he takes a special interest in Homer, an old man who wants to speak out about the city's terrible past and the nostalgia of war and peace. Several of the most profound lines of the movie comes out from Homer, "And if mankind loses its storyteller, then it will lose its childhood" and "Is Peace too uninspiring to write about" and "What is it about peace that keeps its epic from enduring?" !

Frequenting different places of the War-torn city, Damiel find real fun and amusement at circus sitting along with children and laughing his heart out. Here he falls in love with Marion, a lithe trapeze artist in a traveling circus. One of the most romantically beautiful scene is in Marion's caravan where Damiel realizes his love and longing for her and decides to become a human.

From here Wings of Desire could have taken two roads, one that the angel realize his mistake to come down, which is obviously an easy choice and expected, second that he finds out the joy and pleasure he longed for, which is difficult as it may be termed manipulative or childish or unrealistic. Wim Wenders takes the second choice and presents it with child-like realism.

The images where Damiel descends from the sky and tastes his blood and walks along the Berlin Wall and see all the colorful murals is just what a child would have done on the day of his birth ! The Wall of Berlin becomes first lesson for an angel who has just shed his wings for a dip of mortality.

I must be one non-observant fool if I didn't mention the B&W photography in the movie, its mesmerizing. Berlin looks stunning in those B&W montages. To show Angel's in black and white and we mortals all colored sure is life-affirming.

Wings of Desire may be seen in so many different ways, an ode to desire or a dedication to romance or the longing of touching pain and pleasure alike, or the nostalgia of innocence or a heart-felt song of love and life. Its like a landscape or a mural where you zoom in and out, realizing the beauty of it over time and thus appreciating life in all its frailties.

The Beauty of Solitude

Some of us will define solitude as emptiness, but I must say that is full, full of you. It is the time you really think clearly. It is the time you think about the things that can never be thought in non-solitude. Anyway this argument can be easily written off on the basis of being too subjective/perspective, but writing off seldom weaken the argument that is gained out of experience but let me explain a bit.

I have tried to make my days into something that they were not and failed miserably. Mood can't be made, if it can be, it can't be mood. Solitude should be seen in the right light not that solitude is a epidemic or it is a incorrigible state of mind or being alone or just absence of others. Try to remove solitude from any light of guilt as these two mix well. We feel guilty to be solitary and think we are alone because we are no good for company. The other way to put it will be, company is not good for us. At least you will not feel guilty for being yourself.

Solitude is also associated with a feeling that nobody cares for you. Now this a classic loop with a classic assumption. The assumption here is you care for all. For anybody to care for you, you should be at least caring for some. By nature, we don't care about people we don't want to but we want to be cared by people, unaware about their wishes. Need to remember, world is not designed to suit you, or anyone for that matter, this is not say we need to alter ourselves but to say 'nobody cares' including you. Some of the people who care for us usually don't matter to us when they really start caring, as we 'move on' to get the care of new set of people and hence the classic loop. Hence there is always a mismatch of the care you show and get, barring some transition phases when you proclaim you are happy, otherwise you are solitary. Solitude is something that we dread and we usually try to run away from. We usually get the so-called happiness only when we run fast enough. Happiness then looks like a skill we gain through experience rather than the experience itself.

Being in solitude is not being cold or distant to others or running away from people, but its not craving for any pseudo-company or creation of any fake warmth around you to get one. Solitude is saying no to any artificial special effects to show or to perceive that you are a part of a big carnival. Solitude is creating a world of your own in your own little minds, where you can create a carnival or a circus or let loose your train of thoughts and here lies all the 'beauty' of it.

Comfort

Blue viens on his wrist, turned red
First sip of blood and he turned mad

Red lips spoke all about the suspect
They talked about rules and respect

Red is bad as it shows little too much
He changed a lot before coming out as such

Venom is spreading, who has the courage or the will
Comfortable are those who havn't tasted the red pill

Connections

I was watching Oscars and there is one moment which sent me to a though process. The guy who took Oscar for best sound editing/design ( I don't remember exactly) said it is not Science but it is Art. The whole crowd (presumably artists) clapped. The thought that it generated was 'does art still rule over science' and the basic questions, 'what is art' and 'what is science' and 'how they are related' and 'what becomes what when'?

I have almost no answers to it as always but that doesn't check me from writing about it as always. Science is rules of objectivity and Art is the beauty of subjectivism. Science is decision making based on those rules and art is decision making based on beauty that one define oneself. Me writing this post can be a work of science or art. It becomes science when a theory can explain it to totality, which is a difficult job. It becomes art when I refuse to follow any logic other than what I feel is 'true' and I don't consider necessary to give any reasons/logic to it. These arguments can trigger two different allegations for science and art. Allegation for science is it is a constraining thing, but it is not. Nobody stops you from touching the unearthed mysteries provided you have a logical explanation for the same. The allegation for art may be, its escapism and mysticism, since it either defers the answer or complexifies the question itself. It is also not the case because art is not made to explain, it is not made to give easy, logically-verificable, for-all answers, it is here to stimulate you, its here to stir you emotionally not logically, not to say it is illogical, but at times logic falls short, very short, although as a 'thinking man' we try hard to find an explanation, thus a work of art of can result in as many different explanations as the people experiencing it, and its beauty of Art.

As of me, I feel attached to both of them, use them selfishly, self indulgently, sometimes shamelessly too, just to protect my own standpoint. I try to be logical as far as I can get but turn from it whenever I feel insecure of it, void of any objective explanation. I remember one of my friend saying if world is governed by logic only, it will not be same, it will be hellish. I concur to him ! I dread of seeing any logically one dimensional art.

Art and science are typically connected as the later providing a helping hand to former. But Science is more than that, it has its own full beauty. I am not able to pin point any example but I have felt the same spiritual upswing after reading some of the scientific works as I have felt after reading/watching a piece of art. The point here is about the art in science or are they 'that' different ?