Category: Life Ordinary

  • Ok, its alright with me…..

    As I walked towards the parking space to get the vehicle, the lion and the clown beckoned to me. While their masks sported plastic smiles, i could sense the beseeching look their eyes would have. It was almost the end of the day, and when I peeped inside as I walked past, I could find rows and rows of empty counters and mannequins and sales people with equally blank expressions. It wasn’t the first time I had seen this  shop and wondered how they managed to stay afloat. I see it whenever traffic gets held up in the junction. At the heart of the central business district, I am sure it must have seen better times, maybe a time before the malls and the big brands… what plans they must’ve made about sales and revenues and good times…wonder if it really matters now…

    As i rode home, I got stuck in one of those endless traffic snarls that is as characteristic of this city now as a by-two coffee in darshinis. As the honks became louder and tempers got frayed, I thought the ordeal would never end. But  suddenly, the traffic began to move slowly. As I turned a corner, literally and figuratively, I could see a little distance way, a civilian directing traffic. I would’ve thanked him, but by the time I got there, the traffic was moving briskly, and he had crossed the road and disappeared into a lane. I’m sure he wasn’t getting paid, and he didn’t have any plans other than to undo a few knots…

    I make plans… and you make plans.. some plans are better than others… sometimes I have to do what I have to do.. and sometimes, like the Joker, I’m a dog chasing cars, I wouldn’t know what to do if i caught one… but yet, more often than not, Krishna’s words in the Bhagvad Gita make sense. But one is attached – for fame, money, love, combinations of the above and a myriad other reasons.. it is never easy to be detached. I feel sorry for the shop even if they were greedy, and I am envious of the man who walked away after he did what he had to do..

    Plans.. there were things I thought I couldn’t do without, a few years back, a lifestyle which I didn’t want to alter,  I thought a way of living could be kept constant across time, but things change, for a few days I may have mourned, and then I moved on.. they make good nostalgia frames – time,  places, things, people.. they all have a role to play..if you told me then that I would be living without them at a later date, I’d have smiled at you, a knowing smile acknowledging your silliness. But yet, here I am, with a new set that I don’t think I can live without…

    Ok it’s alright with me some things are just meant to be
    it never comes easily and when it does i’m already gone
    i’m practically never still more likely to move until i end up alone at will
    my life continues inching along

    [Eric Hutchinson – Ok it’s alright with me]

    So i move along, and I reach a place and I wonder how it all started… And I realise that even the attachment I claim is such a flimsy piece of string, it unravels for a while, and then at some point, the memory gets cut off, and then perhaps I make up the rest in the image of how it should have started…

    I promise you, I have not changed the beginning of this post, this was an experiment of a thought stream, of giving up control, of not being a hostage to plans, but I  have to wonder, if I knew this was the way it would end, would I have started differently?

    until next time, post….life

    Note: I’d written this post a while back, and it was almost forgotten in ‘drafts’. Chanced upon it, and realised it made sense to publish it on the day before I leave this workplace. 8 years after i started working, I’m finally going to work… for me 🙂

  • Waking Life?

    (not really to do with that excellent film)

    All good things have a season finale, and when it happens to be the last season, the event becomes all the more poignant. Boston Legal has been my favourite show for a while now, and I am a huge fan of Alan Shore‘s sense of fairness. And while the description is tossed around a lot, there really can only be one Denny Crane. True, the last season was lesser than a shadow of the earlier ones, however it still didn’t take away much from the series. But yes, case closed.

    Which brings me to what I shall now be doing on weekdays 10 PM.Yes, I could read more or browse more, but when one has been following a show for quite a while, one does feel a sense of emptiness. It led me to think about how a life is spent nowadays. Sometime back I had wondered whether everyone’s life would be ‘interesting’ if it were to be fitted into a 2.5- 3 hour movie. Interesting relative to the daily routine that a typical life follows. Yes, the ‘different’ vacations included. And yes yes, there are those who lead an interesting life 24×365, ‘it depends’ blah blah, let’s forget all that, let’s say I’m talking about mine. Subjective, and at least a few others I know of.

    So, typically, there’s a routine, work, dinner, television/internet, weekends, shopping, cinema etc… How many of these are conscious choices and how many happen by default? Not the conscious choice of choosing say ‘Lost’ over ‘Ugly Betty’, but at least a couple of levels above that to say watching television vs going for a walk. Does the former happen by default,unless of course a health scare suddenly makes you stop, think, and take a re-look at perspectives, and therefore go for a walk?

    So far, I will have to admit that mine happens by default. And what typically happens is that when a template is broken, like in this case, there is a sense of ‘boredom’ till a replacement is found. On twitter, these days, I find a lot of versions of the “I’m bored” tweet in my stream. It made me wonder about how we really spend our time, about multitasking. Heh.  About incomplete experiences. As real time and technology advances are made at dizzying spaces, I think the templates are being formed faster and the dependence on them becoming stronger. Even at this stage, the differences between the tail and the dog are blurring. What really matters to me – the experience, the sharing of the experience, filling up waking hours, racing with time to complete x tasks in y time? What is the driver? Damn, its not even a who.

    So I stepped back and asked why it was so? Is it because I never thought about it that way? Is it because it is easier to make a template and follow? Oh yes, switching on the telly, or playing around on FB is definitely is easier than figuring out what one wants, how one wants to spend one’s time, and other such difficult questions. These require an effort,  not just in thought but in deed (eg.trying out an interest like the ‘learning how to play the guitar’ route) and answers to tougher questions in the background. Or then again, is it because of a fascination, a way of living vicariously through the real and fictional characters – on the net and television? Or to ensure that there is no time left for such thoughts, because I know they’re difficult ones? I think a bit of each, and anything else you’d like to add?

    And so, is it possible to make conscious choices every moment? Would that be the best way to fully live a life? I wonder what it would do to ‘expectations’ though – set me free or get amplified, for isn’t each expectation derived from a previous direct or indirect experience? But that can be dealt with later, for now, the idea, to use Mo’s words is to (edited) a wee bit “devour every little bit of whatever is on your platter”, and yes, I need to consciously decide what’s on the platter.

    until next time, crouching potato 🙂

  • Flipkart affiliate program

    Just found out, on Twitter, about Flipkart’s affiliate program. Since this blog has over 30 book reviews and is bound to have many more, I thought it makes sense for me to add the bit of code to the review posts. Okay, you don’t need to flip, it isn’t as though I’m going to bully you into buying a book, since I know that in case you don’t like it, you’ll throw the book at me. :p

    Meanwhile, it helps that I’m a satisfied customer of Flipkart and can, within reasonable limits, recommend their service.

    It’s right at the end of each book review, so in case you’re planning to buy the book, it would be great if  you can do so from here. I’ll get a tiny share, and you’ll help feed a hungry blogger.

    Food for thought, of course. Ok, chocolate too occasionally 😉

  • The Immortal’s reality

    ‘1984’ is a subject that has appeared in many conversations, no, not Indira Gandhi’s assassination, George Orwell’s book. And every time it did, I have smiled politely and pleaded ignorance except for ‘Big Brother’, nothing to do with Shilpa Shetty’s adventures or Sunny Deol’s movie, in spite of my Bollywood fixation. I read the book a while back, and was absolutely fascinated by the dystopian world Orwell has created.

    Though I found many facets of the book interesting, there were two that were more equal than the others. 🙂 One was the idea of a few people controlling the minds and actions through unrelenting propaganda (among other things) and the sentence ‘He who controls the past controls the future, he controls the present controls the past’. History being written by winners, and it being what’s recorded (either in books or other data storage devices), or people’s minds. The second interesting thing is to do with the latter, of how reality is such a deceptive thing, and is of our own making. If there are two of us, and both of us agree that one is flying, then that is reality for us. Yes, you might laugh at the simplistic approach, but in the context of the book, absolutely possible.

    The human mind, its storage capabilities, and its evolution is a subject that keeps popping up regularly in this blog. Recently, the concept of singularity has interested me a lot, and I’ve been reading up material available on the net. While I’ve been interested in science fiction for quite a long time (from watching Star Trek and Sigma on DD, okay well, that’s a start to Doctor Who and the Foundation series in school and college, with minor setbacks like not being able to like Clarke, and recently, not able to enjoy Doctor Who on the BBC) and I saw singularity as a natural progression of that basic interest. Except, as I read more, I realise the lines between fiction and reality are beginning to get blurred.

    I had an interesting conversation recently with a friend S which was a sort of mash up of both these subjects. We were discussing the effects of these advances on society. I brought up the argument from 1984 that whatever happened the three tier classification of society (high, middle and low classes) would be retained in some form or the other. S was of the opinion that the have- have not divide would widen, he even brought up the concept of human farms, harvested for body parts. (a human controlled version of the Matrix). The 1984 premise of thought control would be perfect for that.

    And then, after teleportation, time travel, whether teleportation would be significant if we are able to replicate all sensations before that (as of now, we can see and hear across distances, smell, taste, touch remain) and similar interesting stuff came the subject of immortality. I said , one of the things that sadden me when I’m reading science fiction is that I’ll not be around to witness science fiction becoming reality. But I also  wondered whether, even if the body were capable of lasting for an infinite amount of time, would the mind be ready for it. All of our life, we base on finite time – things to be done, objectives to be achieved, what if we had all the time in the world, how would we adjust? S pointed out that these things happen gradually, and by the time we become immortal, we would have already grown used to really long life spans. Like many things now, we would take it for granted, and would not appreciate the significance. We were only having coffee but discussed how there might still be loss of (memory of) experiences so far, and how there would perhaps be preloaded SIM cards one could install, and how the immortal’s “will” would have instructions of the “I don’t want a Windows OS for my body, Chrome is where my heart is” variety. Ok, cheesy, but can you imagine the possibilities?

    My biggest concern was the revenue model. If i lived forever, how would I afford it? What would be the economics of such an existence? Writer this century, sportsman the next, will natural ability be of any value or significance? And the final question, will we able to control time enough to have alternate realities? S says never, but i get back to the 1984 premise of reality, of controlling sources of information to ensure that the past is consistent with the present, and I wonder what humanity will end up doing.

    until next time, morality and mortality…

  • Once in a blue moon..

    ..comes a movie, these days, that forces me to write about it thanks to its mindblowing simplicity. Yes, that is a rare combination of words, at least for me. 🙂

    I had hoped to watch Neelathamara when I’d gone home last, but was quite surprised to find that it wasn’t playing anymore in any of the theatres in Cochin. So, when it was released in PVR a fortnight back, I made it a point to book in advance, since very few Malayalam movies last beyond a week here. We had some drama off the screen, since Sreedevi Unni, who has a major role in the movie, was also in the theatre. Also, the entire title sequence was shown in split screen despite the traditional howling protests. Apparently the projection guy was busy with his dinner!! 🙂

    In this age when the “poor girl meets rich boy and falls in love” theme is used mainly in film spoofs, it is perhaps impossible to imagine that this seemingly flimsy storyline can evolve into a movie that kept me spellbound for almost 2 hours. Neelathamara would translate to “blue lotus”, but as a character points out in the beginning of the movie, the flower in question is really not a lotus. But it does serve as a symbol of dreams, faith and perhaps, illusions too.

    The movie is based on an original story by M.T.Vasudevan Nair, and was also made into a movie way back in 1979, with him writing the script. This is a modern retelling and the same author has made a few tweaks to suit a modern audience. Kudos to him for doing that but yet ensuring that the simplicity of the original story is retained. I couldn’t slot this movie into any pre defined movie category of mine. It didn’t make me think, it is definitely not timepass, it does not serve out dollops of comedy/drama/action and yet it affected me more than any recent movie has.

    So what really was it that worked? There were a set of well written characters, who retained a certain integrity about themselves. Each of them were special in their own way, and not just the main characters, but the supporting cast too -Sreedevi Unni as the hero’s mother, Rima Kallingal as Ammini (after the urban woman in rithu, this character was a polar opposite, but handled well), Samvrutha as Ratnam in a neat cameo, the bhagavathar who never appears on screen, but whose music adds so much to the movie, the aashaan whose wise words about the nature of life remained with me, they all played a crucial part. The author also managed to leave a few things to the viewer’s imagination, giving enough hints to help complete the story. (Ammini’s story) Archana who plays the principal character of Kunjimalu steals the show with her subtle rendition. And though the hero is really no match, (erm, no pun intended, really) his portrayal of a character whose interest in the girl is at best a distraction, is quite genuine.

    The songs are absolutely fantastic, and while sublime in themselves, also manage to take the storyline forward. This would be my favourite.

    httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCk2KM-j0EE

    The movie runs at its own pace, and yet never managed to bore me. A lot of it had perhaps to do with the way it has re-captured a rustic Kerala setting from a few decades back. The temple, temple pond gossip, aalmaram conversations, they seem a world from long ago, simple and almost self sufficient. I think that’s just it. While I was born in a city and lived all my life there, the world the movie is set in, is one I am familiar with, thanks to vacations and temple visits. The movie was a journey in time, and more than a place and time, it was a way of life. It rekindled a hope in me, that one day I’ll be able to go back to Kerala, and live in that state.. of mind.  Its a dream of simplicity, my very own neelathamara.

    until next time,  if you haven’t done so yet, visit the spanking new home – www.manuprasad.com 🙂