Thought crucible

OK, notwithstanding the immense, mostly unfounded criticism by my friends in college, I thought I had to make this (rather long) point :) . Has the cinematography hit such a stunning pinnacle that the audience comes to expect similar performances from something like the white wall face of Ash? Surely, histrionics is the hinge to good Cinema, but can’t we – just for the sake of a brilliant story-teller agree to look over the expressionless and mind-numbing performances?! In all the brouhaha about ‘confused script’, ‘lame story-telling’, ‘expected ending’- have we chosen to forget what to expect and what to neglect when it comes to appreciating cinema. And I call it cinema and not a movie. You can expect a movie to have sudden twists, unexpected endings, and all the now-rather-cliched tricks of the trade. But Good Cinema – well it deals with the simplest of plots and what is crucial here is the way it is narrated. I agree there were blotches in the screenplay that could have been avoided...

There was once a just king by the name Rama and there was an evil king by the name Ravana. Rama kills Ravana and saves Sita. Now thats the Ramayana for you and me. Well, the genius of Mani Ratnam meets a rather subdued perspective of the Ramayana in an epic called Ravan. A perspective that echoes the same sentiment as the temple dedicated to Ravana in one of the many unusual temples that adorn this country. A perspective where Soorapanaka was considered a beauty that was unparalleled by anyone. A perspective that recognises the various Grays of Good and Bad - just like the artistic appeal of the can of white that mixes with the sea of Black in the opening credits for this 5 starrer entertainer. Set in the backdrop of stunning tribal locales, the opening scenes seem to reflect the chilling horrors of the recent Naxal massacre of the Men in Khakhi. Beera (Abhishek Bachchan) plays the eccentric dark protag, who dares to kidnap the belowed dancer wife of Dev(Vikram) - Raagini (Aishwarya Ra...

Bibek Sabharwal was tried in Finland and as the ever merciful courts of that country pronounced a death sentence, more than one prayer was answered. As the judges and jury and the grand army of conscience keepers listened to the chilling tales of pure terror, atheists believed in Devil. After gouging out the eyes of the young women, he delivered a psychotic account of the problem statement. And the statement was not merely a concoction of constraints and freedoms in a fixed set of physical dimensions. The statement as they said, would help crossing ancient barriers of understanding across a wide range of research areas. The solution lay not in the objective abstracts of Maths, Geometry and Space, but in an inward journey. He then tortured out an account of the inner landscapes the prostitute and the actress saw. It isn't sure how coherent or even truthful they were, but the Devil would have surely known the tricks. And as these vivid descriptions had spewed forth, he had seen a sol...

The Finnish papers had screamed how gruesome the death of Riika Haikkinen was. The blue eyes of the mother of one-year-old Kimi had been gouged out as the hollow spaces of her once beautiful face screeched of morbidity. The efforts of Olaf and the Polissi had paid off as the as yet undecomposed body and pale body of the young actress lay in the frigid depths of Scandinavia. The press traversed annals of national well-being and literary successes to dig out the files of Elya Linnanein - a teenage prostitute murdered in the same horrifying manner as Riika. Surely the recent developments pointed fingers to someone other than Elya's greedy pimp. I could see the dark side of what they call human psyche when the august presence of Bibek Sabharwal made itself known at the reception of Mysore Mallige - my humble motel among the thousand lakes in Finland. My mother's sixth sense about me possessing one had proved horrifyingly right as I stared at the stone cold body of Elya Linnanein. T...

Except for that glint of silver in the overcast skies, all was bleak and dull at the university gates. Prof. Bibek Sabharwal had returned after his hiatus at the turquoise lakes in the Scandinavian snow. Millions of eyes lay fixated on the noisy feed from the few good men fortunate to have arrived at the hallowed gates on knowing that Sabharwal had made a rather covert landing in the wee hours of that sleepy Sunday morning. In another couple of hours, satellites would spew out HDTV data with detailed stories, as Dr. Sabharwal would peel out another layer of that 'Third Eye'. "Get out of my way! Scoundrels!", yelled the octogenarian at the inane cameraman who had dared to step on the 1940 'Welcome' jute mat he and his late wife had bought during their honeymoon. "You filthy bastards can't wait for another two hours when you have waited for an eternity and six months?!". The dazed cameraman withdrew to puffs of A-1 and Kulla Kulli BDs as superior e...

Even as the title itself suggests the intent of the writer in describing the darkness of more than one kind, Joseph Conrad's novella goes beyond portraying the harsh rainforests of Congo or the morbid depths of human psyche or even the tyranny of imperialistic rule. What was most impressive about the book was how Conrad explores and describes situations and experiences in the Heart of Darkness that is Africa. His contemplation on the cannibals' restraint in a certain episode or his narration of the sighting of the wild primeval men and his appreciation of their raw humanity like yours and mine or his facetious comments on high-handed Imperialism or describing Kurtz's 'Intended''s mourning a year later - an entire gamut of human expression is traversed. One of the most striking features of this book is how the author describes the life-like quality of the wilderness and the almost phantasmagorical description of his crew's trip down the Congo river into the ...

Ever since the advent of Wikipedia, it's variants and more importantly the idea of Web 2.5ing, there was always this sub-conscious effort from my side to be relevant in the accumulation of the most obscure of facts about the most obscure of places and people. Not only has my active participation been a rather interesting phenomenon, but the idea of a person who I would never have even imagined that I would meet, hooks up and we end up spending hours fighting virtual Mafia wars, the concept kind of starts getting a little trippy. These phenomena no doubt exhibit characteristics that are so profoundly impacted by time - just like the supposed maturity of a person or the understanding of the world or the more and more compact stuffing of switches and devices in a tenth of a micron square. But this particular aim of 'world knowledge' and a 'single consciousness' no longer begs but commands our attention as more and more rapid progress is being made in all fields concern...

It is with great pain and with little repentence I question beliefs that have become so ingrained in our society and way of thinking today. It is still so shocking to see babies thrown from atop buildings and burnt in bonfires in the name of black magic. But lets just take a step back and analyse what we have called black magic - an attempt to achieve ends my means that have no justification or reasoning, but are based purely on the whims and the divine afflati of old men witnessing mescaline sunsets and perhaps having necrophilistic tendencies. They say that the scriptures that were and are studied with such great veneration is really a description of the held ideas of those days and it is despicable that even today we decide to judge people and ideas based on our ability or even our willingness to shower that same veneration. The concept of God is a fundamentally personal one. It is just as bizarre to think of an old man looking at us from the sky as it is to bank on divine interfer...

Good evening Mr. S.S. Mantha ,Chairman of AICTE, Mr. B.R.Bhat, respected Directors, Deans, our beloved faculty, staff and my adorable friends. We are gathered here on the solemn occasion of valediction after four years of what almost 500 students can vouch for as their best times in their life. From naive, idealistic, sober juveniles, we have transformed into mature, sometimes high-spirited individuals who shall be passing on the baton that has been so regally passed on for the past 5 decades in this Institute. Looking at all the high-flying batches pass out in front of us over the past four years, there was always a sense of trepidation that we might just drop the baton at this critical juncture. Well, it turns out that the army of individuals that are seated here in their best of attire have attained what has been rarely achieved and what will be tough to emulate in the years to come. Be it in landing some of the finest jobs in the market, admits to the finest Technical and Business...

They are right here! Not rinsed in the blinking stardust of a moonless night. Not lurking in an abstuse alcove waiting to take you down. Not drenched in 40-year-old muck in a defunct tap on a deserted building. Not through the ups and downs of an electromagnetic field from the TV and the muck-girl with all that goo, poo and her circular voodoo. Death is just a continuation of life, only unbeknownst to the whole world. You take the same few steps to the bathroom and the same number of strokes will clean the eternally yellow teeth and the same watery coffee at the mess. We just lead life like we always did and 'die' like we always will. The chain is an extended one, being a speck on that circumference that spans by an unimaginagly large radius. So it is freaky to know that when I am alive, the little mind games in the mind are not really games and funny they definitely aren't. Who said that the little nudge that caused the movement of the chains in the stairs at home wasn...