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 ?

Cocktail

This weekend I saw two movies, almost diagonally apart. One is Michael Haneke's The Piano Teacher and the second is the Giuseppe Tornatore's classic Cinema Paradiso. The Piano teacher is about female psyche and the unearthed sides of it and Cinema Paradiso is about a romantic affair of a boy with movies. One is dark and disturbing, other light and heart-ringing, but made a good cocktail and I still have a pleasant hangover. I feel I should write about The Piano Teacher first.

The Piano Teacher is a compelling and psycho dramatic portrayal of a woman in her late 30s, and her darker chambers. The Piano teacher is a movie where you see the mind of 'Erika' peeled off layer by layer. The otherwise plain and almost pious looking Erika has her dark sexual fantasies that are more sado-masochistic than sexual. Erika wants to take the reins of desires in her hand and took pleasure out of it. There are several points in the movie where Erika do the things we could hardly expect from her if we believe her saintly appearance. The episode of putting broken glass pieces in her pupil's coat is nerve-chilling to see, closely followed by it is another shocking display of sadism in a brilliant scene in lavatory with one of her good-looking and talented student, Walter. Here she behaves more like a typical male and try to take control of the situation in whatever way she likes.

Erika doesn't have a sweet relationship with her mother and her father is in asylum. The relations with her students is almost coldly sadistic, we never hear her praising any of them. She was sexually starved but not in a straight way but distorted to a level that we discover in a multi-page letter that she writes to Walter. Walter who longed for her soon starts loathing her after reading the letter and announces her to be 'sick' and try to give her what he calls 'a deserved punishment' in the penultimate scene of the movie for apparently messing up with a 'man'!

Isabelle Huppert as Erika gives a solid performance where she enters into unlit alleys of Erika's mind with laser-like intensity. Her portrayal of a woman with unnaturally hindered emotions is honestly moving and truly believable. We don't feel any true sympathy for her except in last few sequences. Benot Magimel as Walter is impeccable as a man in love to a man in hate, loathing and disgust. Both of them shift gears easily when they exchange the roles of the tormentor and the tormented.

There is one more important component of the movie and that is Piano, it serves as the pain-generating machine through out the movie, standing on the thin lines between chilling music, agony and madness. The music lessons seldom generate any warmth or peace but they generate an unsettling disturbance that Erika lynches her students with.

The last scene is difficult to assimilate or rather difficult to watch. Here Erika's pain and self-loathing are so evident that it hurts. The Piano Teacher is not about any moral fool-talk. Its infact a terrific character sketch of a woman with confused desires, bizarre fantasies, one who tries to make her rules of love, one who finds brutal rape more pleasurable than tender love making, a slap more satisfying than a kiss.

Life...

Fun and self destruction, painting and filing, clinging and letting it go are some of the choices we take on day today basis and we start realizing that they matter to us more than we might casually think. The choices to decide which side of the thin line we should fall, takes much of our lives. Life is too hard a topic to comprehend, so easy to write off and too very tempting to invite a nasty comment every now and then.

Seeing life with purple glasses or with blue filters do make it different but its very nature of a lover-bitch remains the same, its tempts you and messes with you, and you don't mind it to an extent that can check you from messing with it again or it with you. Its not so funny game but life keeps us going. We get in terms with the life so many times that it looks life is almost static and we are the one who are moving with no tangible purpose or force and punching the blameless life like a sandbag. This is not to restate that life confuses us, but it is to restate the other obvious thing that life interests us, intrigues us, tempts us to a level that we become almost involved to its unbearable loss of control. It may be regarded as a fine puzzle or a bizarre game but that will be underrating it.

Life is a pursuit to find something, life is to survive, life is to evolve but life is also to understand it. It is just like a Guinea Pig trying to find out which experiment he is subjected to and more importantly why. This possibility interest me, the possibility of knowing life as it would have been if I am not a part of it sure is tempting. 'Life is a mystery' may be regarded as the most true cliché but saying it do puts life in a Ph.D. zone, I would like it to be a mandatory subject at our schools provided nobody teaches us and we mark our own sheets.

Eternal Sunshine

Today's Valentines day. Not that I care but I must take this opportunity to write about an unique movie that is set on Valentines day and makes decent fun of it.

A romantic comedy has three step formula, boy meets girl, girl breaks up with the guy, boy gets her in the end. There is even lesser you can put inside it. Therefore some of us disregard them as uninspired mushy stuff which most of the times they are. But there are times when a so-called romantic comedy get on your nerves. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind do exactly that. What do your memories mean to you, What if you like to forget the stuff you cannot get over, What about connection between Heart and Mind, what rules over what. Can bitterest of the memories have sweetest bit. Can we get over someone easily. Can love be erased altogether. Eternal sunshine don't answer any of these questions but raise all of them all the time.

Most of proceedings of the movie take place in minds of unassuming Joel and beautifully uninhibited Clementine. You get in and get out their heads and all those sequences are crafted with millimeter perfection. The inventive non-chronological way of storytelling looks made for the narrative. You go back and forth, in and out, from beach to frozen river.

Intentional loss of some specific memory forms the base of the movie. If you are not able to forget someone you loved, then Lacuna's services are just made for you. Clementine gets 'it' done and Joel goes for it just to realize that those bitter memories are too sweet to loose. And we see his tussle to cling to the faintest of the memories that are getting ripped off one by one. And here all the magic takes place.

I am always interested subplots given they are cleverly done, here also there is a brilliant subplot of Mary and Dr. Howard which give Eternal Sunshine a wider perspective.

What makes Eternal sunshine so rewarding is the fact that it is unlikely any movie I have seen, leave aside the romantic comedy genre. Eternal Sunshine do fit in the 3 step formula of a romantic comedy but rips everything inside it and we enjoy this mind-blowing carnage.

How happy is the blameless vestal's lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Each pray'r accepted, and each wish resign'd.
Alexander Pope, "Eloisa to Abelard"