Author: manuscrypts

  • ESC

    Could’ve been the subliminal effects of ‘bridge’ – no, not the card game, just the word, which had appeared in the title of two posts in the recent past, or serendipity playing its part during random channel surfing, whatever the reason, I chanced upon the movie ‘Bridge to Terabithia‘ recently. Its about two pre teens – Jess and Leslie, who, despite their different circumstances, become friends and  imagine themselves an entire fantasy kingdom, complete with trolls and monsters and evil forces – Terabithia, where they rule as king and queen.

    Jess, though talented, has to deal with problems at home as well as school, and is a loner. This changes with the arrival of Leslie, who beats him in a running event, something which Jess had been training for. They also happen to be neighbours, and soon, Leslie compliments Jess on his drawing skills, when she comes across his notebook. They become friends and create Terabithia. Terabithia is a reflection of their real life, and the evil forces are usually versions of characters in real life, like the school bully, who appears as a troll.

    What appealed to me was the sensitivity that flows through the movie, in its characters, in situations and the way they react to them. It doesn’t have the mesmerising special effects that usually accompany the fantasy genre, but if you have ever imagined as a child, you would immediately identify with the story. AnnaSophia Robb, as Leslie, and Josh Hutcherson, as Jess have both acted extremely well. They make you believe. Terabithia is a haven for the two children to escape from the strife of their daily existence. Actually, I felt Leslie creates it more for Jess than herself, inspired by his drawings, though she is also a loner, who finds it difficult to make friends.

    [Spoiler ahead, though I’d say its relatively unimportant. If you do watch the movie, the sensitive portrayal is the attraction]

    Jess’ music teacher, who has seen his drawings, invites him on a Saturday to visit the art museum. Jess doesn’t invite Leslie, and returns to find out that Leslie had drowned while trying to swing across the creek. (the way to Terabithia) After a brief period during which he blames himself for the death, Jess decides to rebuild Terabithia as a way to remember Leslie. The film ends with him inviting his sister May Belle, who had been kept away from Jess and Leslie’s fantasy world so far, to be the new queen of Terabithia.

    I wondered about the ending. To me, Jess’ visit to the museum, guided by an adult, was a way of showing his breaking away from childhood fantasy, and entering the ‘real’ world. His drawings were a reflection of his life, and the introduction to art would mean that he has a new way of channelling his talent, and moving beyond the problems of his daily life. Leslie’s death accentuates this since she had taken the initiative to form Terabithia. I’d perhaps have had May Belle discovering the drawing book (again) and this time Jesse allowing her to draw and make her own worlds.

    Havens. Some of us make them from childhood. Each part of our life would be characterised by an escape hatch, which was relevant only for that particular age. As I’d twittered a few days back, weekends become the life support for the drudgery of the working week. It brings with it different escape routes, things that I look forward to. I heard a colleague say recently that his kid counted the days till Saturday. I reminded him that we do that too. The more things change, the more they remain the same. Imaginary friends, fantasy worlds, pub hopping, real friends, reading, gaming, movies, vacations, virtual lifestreams…in some way are these all escape routes? On one level, these are escape routes from our reality, they take us to worlds which are more appealing, they give us a temporary release.  What do my escape routes say about me? At another level, I do wonder what we really want to escape from.

    until next time, Houdini of sorts…

  • Gorky Park

    Martin Cruz-Smith

    Gorky Park is the first of the Arkady Renko series – 2 others set in the Soviet era, and three after the fall of the Soviet Union.
    The book is as much a story about people and places as it is a crime thriller. The book starts with 3 bodies found in Gorky Park, in Moscow, with their faces and fingertips cut off. The investigation is led by Arkady Renko, who, after initial attempts to pass the case on to the KGB, sets out in dogged pursuit of the killer.
    Renko, the son of a famous general, battles his own demons as he plods through a bureaucracy that is rife with politics and corruption. Through the characters, the author manages to bring to life the character of Russia itself, from Moscow to Leningrad to Siberia.
    In a milieu where even a slight tone of dissent causes a person to be labeled as mentally disturbed, and procedures to be carried out on him to cement the case, Renko’s tenacity and his stubbornness to not let go of the case until the killer is brought to justice, ensures that he makes powerful enemies, who try everything to take him out.
    And while the mystery gets solved, we also find the human yearning for freedom and the paradox of wanting to be in a place where one belongs.

  • Truth and Friction

    The ghost of last week’s post lurks. I read a few days back that the NBA had been called to discuss the issue of obscene questions being asked by Rajeev Khandelwal on Sach ka Samna. Ha! Gotcha. This NBA is the National Broadcasting Association. 🙂

    According to the news report, Brinda Karat said that such shows outraged the modesty of women. The woman in question, of course, must’ve been tortured for several days before she agreed to be part of the show. Quite possible also that they threatened to send her to Rome, and specifically “Putin’s bed“, if she didn’t agree. She really musn’t have had any choice. I can understand how politicians and truth serum manufacturers would have a problem if speaking the truth became some some sort of an epidemic. What if people spoke the truth by default? Gah. I’d written a post sometime back, provoked by the original show – The Moment of Truth, in which I’d spoken about the evolution of a transparent culture, much like the subject of last week’s post.

    But now I really am at a loss as to what is delivering me (U,B added because its subjective) the bigger WTF – the television shows or the politicians. There was the RSS (Rakhi Sawant’s Swayamvar) show, in which guys went lattoo over Rakhi while Ram Kapoor lustily looked on at the object of his affection – the box of laddoos. The nation climaxed as the NRI got the girl and the rest got rakhis. I think there is definitely a scope for another season, possibly with a tie-up with some matrimonial website to register participants. Or maybe a spin off with Ram Kap titled ‘Shaadi ke Laddoo ke side effects’? (Update: Rahul Mahajan is going to be swayamvared in the next season) Then there are celebrities being housed in a jungle – ‘celebrities’ like Fiza, whose claim to fame is her previous show with Chand – ‘Is Junglee se mujhe bachao’. There is a marriage happening inside a show to which real people – viewers, are invited, and who can ignore Balika Vadhu, which I had initially thought was a spin off from the Hanuman show, centering around Bali’s wedding, but which I now like for its layered acronym – BV. (yep, i’ve seen a couple of episodes of each) Speaking of BV, this is also a show that our politicians had a problem with – claiming that it promoted child marriage.

    The politicians who seem to have addressed all the nation’s problems soon after getting elected, are now taking a break and sampling the pleasures of Indian television.  They are actually wondering what we are teaching our children and are talking about the Mahabharata, though i’m damn sure that if the series ran now, they would be claiming that Draupadi’s disrobing was promoting rape attempts, and Krishna’s number of wives, polygamy. I could give more examples, but you get the drift.

    Where is all this going? Not the politicians, but I wonder about this oxymoron called a reality show. As each channel tries to trump the competition, would the boundaries between truth and fiction blur more? In effect, though scripted, a lot of shows operate in the private spaces of individuals and their families. How does all of this affect the reality fabric – of family, relationships, society, pop culture etc? How far will we go to escape from ourselves? How many steps away are we away from seeing death – real last moments, on TV?

    Think about it, while I conceptualise this kids reality show, in which children will be left in a jungle, and every day, they take polygraph tests. If they are truthful, they get laddoos, else they have to spend a day in parliament. The winner of course, gets married off.

    until next time, tube toppers…

    PS. Sheer coincidence this time, that Rakhi had to make her presence felt in a post on Rakshabandhan Day, unlike the previous years. 1, 2.

  • Cornucopia

    Cornucopia is part of a ‘cricket homestay’ called ‘The Bat and Ball Inn’, supposedly owned by Sreesanth, Uthappa, Charu Sharma and one other partner. No, you won’t find appams here, the place serves Continental and Italian fare. 😀

    Here’s a map that will show you how to get there. While you can access it from Hosur Road, its easier to get there via Richmond Road. On Richmond Road, take a left turn immediately after TNT (opposite Citibank) and then take the first right. You’ll see the place on the right. It also hosts a cafe called ‘Silly Point’, and a boutique (which I think is) called ‘Dressing Room’. (It was about to rain, so my focus was on getting inside, especially since we had lost much time in trying to figure out the location, and had a movie to catch) From what we saw there, you don’t really need to reserve.

    There are two seatng options, one a regular restaurant closed setting, and the other behind this, which is a bit more open. On the way to the latter, you have a passageway lined with framed caricatures of cricketers. I half expected to see staff in cricket gear, but they haven’t gone that far with the theme. 🙂

    The menu has a lot of options, both veg and non veg – Continental and some Italian too. You can take a look at the entire menu here. There are soups, starters and salads, in addition to the main course options and desserts. We started with a ‘Spiced chicken and corn soup with lemon grass’  (cream of chicken and corn kernels with spring onion, coriander, chilly and lime). The soup was extremely good, probably the best we’ve had in a long time. It was moderately spicy and on a chilly Bangalore night, was a perfect start. If you’re planning a long leisurely meal, you might want to check out the starters too.

    For the main course, we ordered a Stuffed Chicken Breast Nanterre (chicken breast stuffed with minced pate and mushroom grilled and served with a red wine, green chilly and cheese sauce) and a Poached Chicken Breast Clemenceau (chicken cooked in wine and mushroom, finished with cream, herbs and crushed peppercorn). You have to order mashed potato separately, though they didn’t bill us for the bread and flavoured butter. Both the dishes were extremely good, with distinct flavours that I could detect even with my taste buds being retired hurt (thanks to a bad cold). The chicken was done well, and not undercooked (like in many places that serve Continental stuff) and the sauces were simply superb. Both dishes highly recommended.

    We were too stuffed for dessert, so that’s been left for the next time we drop in. Thankfully, the end of the meal also brought a mini shot of chocolate and coffee, in a semi liquid state, with chocolate just managing to edge out the coffee flavor. Coffee takes revenge by not allowing the mix to get too sweet. I refuse to intercede because I’m busy convincing myself  that its dessert. 🙂

    All of the above cost us just below Rs.800. With desserts and starters, it would be around Rs.1000. The service deserves special mention because it was extremely prompt. You should drop in for a relaxed ambience, extremely good food and if I have to judge from that mini-shot, awesome desserts. 🙂

    Cornucopia, 3, Laurel lane, Richmond Town Ph: 41149495

  • Bridge over troubled water

    In ‘Tin Fish‘, there is a wonderful speech given by the school captain, which goes (edited a bit)

    …..I am not what I’d have liked to be. The school is aiming to prepare me for others. I want to be for myself. But it is growing increasingly difficult for me to prepare myself for myself as my expectations grow greater. A reformed, open-hearted school can help me. Till then, I shall stand on the beaches, look towards the sea and wait for a solution to be washed ashore.

    The novel is set in a boarding school in Rajasthan, deals with peer and parental pressure, and has the chaotic politics of the 70s as the backdrop. As a late 70s born, I could identify with the book because though the cultural icons had changed (rock bands/actresses etc) societal changes seemed to have moved at a much slower pace. The value and belief systems as well as the prejudices – caste, religion, income are a part of the 80s too.

    I could also identify with the above excerpt on two counts. ‘Preparing me for others’ ..the pressure to conform – on the kind of education one should have, the kind of career one chose, the kind of person one could get married to, one’s conduct with family, boss, and one’s behaviour in society in general, all had their own sets of conformity. ‘Prepare myself for myself’..when I wrote this post sometime back, I had mentioned the conformity that the blog imposes on the blogger, it is something that happens in real life too – we create an image of ourselves, consciously or more likely, sub consciously, and try to stick to it. In either case, more often than not, objectivity will be lost.

    Sometime back, I also came across this wonderful piece in the New York magazine, titled ‘Say Everything’. It talks about how as the young population gets increasingly used to the net, there are many among them, for whom, sharing their ‘stuff’ online is the natural way to be, and for whom, privacy has an entirely different definition. In fact they consider the extreme caution of the earlier net generation to be narcissistic and are prepared for the implications that the shared stuff might have on their lives decades later. The author sees this as the biggest generation gap in a long time, perhaps since the hippie generation. She even wonders whether in this era of surveillance cameras and tracked card transactions, their belief that privacy is an illusion might be the sane approach. The article outlines a series of changes that are happening with this generation –  “they think of themselves as having an audience, they have archived their adolescence, their skin is thicker than ours”

    Now, one could say that they are conforming to an online audience (like my blog example), but as the author points out, over a period of time, will this generation, which has been growing up with the net, move towards such degrees of comfort that they are totally un-self conscious? And perhaps, to quote the extreme example used by the author, a Paris Hilton level where what could have been the worst humiliation possible, was used as a stepping stone for fame? A generation so transparent that any ‘forced’ conformity would be easily detected and would be undesired. And moving on, to use the words I had seen in a totally different context (link), would transparency be (or subsume) objectivity?

    At this stage, we are of course, smack in the middle of these changes, but unlike the above generation, technology (more specifically, the web) entered our lives relatively much later. We perhaps have the baggage of not just peers/parents/society but also the ones we have created for ourselves earlier on in our lives. We might struggle to adjust, but yet we are perhaps the bridge generation, across the cultural changes wrought by the www or even liberalisation (in India). Did every generation have to play similar roles? 🙂

    until next time, stage fright