Implosions in creativity

On right and wrong

2011-01-19T10:10:00.004-05:00

"Everything is lawful", says Ivan in the classic The Brothers Karamazov. In response to which the novice saint Alyosha smiles and gives him a kiss on his lips. Hard to understand, but doing the right thing is the same thing as doing something wrong. Being good is the same thing as being evil. There is no difference. No moral repercussions follow whichever path we choose. People do that. They commit and justify the most grievous, heinous acts. They justify any misdeed. I mean anything. What makes great men? What makes wise men who are so far and few? They might be the ones that see both paths, really the grayness to be just the same and still pick the 'good' over the 'bad'. God, moral codes, ethics may help in making such choices. Conscience is one of the biggest burdens faced by a free man, devoid of God. Doestovsky describes this far better than I can, ever. For the wise men out there, I also got one Steinbeck's word " timshol".

On hope and faith

2010-11-16T12:31:00.026-05:00

It is convenient to categorize people and their relation to faith into these blocks:

Ones with blind faith in god.
Reasoned believers.
Non-believers who haven't quite thought about it and hence do not have conviction.
Reasoned non-believers.
people who gloss over their infirmities using god:)

One may cope with difficult circumstances by not relying on faith/god. There is usually a point where one usually finds it extremely hard to continue doing so. At some point in our lives, faith usually steps in and saves when we cannot survive by ourselves anymore. People follow a statistical distribution in the types of their reactions to adversity. Such reactions are also distributed across times. for e.g. if your dad dies, you may resort to faith immediately or at a much later point (distributed). No two people are exactly alike in their reactions. Few people even risk saying there is no God. Most meekly obey and play along with rituals even; worship rather than be defiant. On a personal note, I have never been through a situation which I have not been able to cope with, myself. The longer I do this, the stronger I get, the firmer my conviction becomes that man is alone.
It has been a year since I realized the importance of hope in a man's life. I thought I had hit a dead end; no amount of thinking was letting me progress further, if there is in fact scope for any more progress. However recently, I got some much needed help from an uncle who understood where I was and asked me to think about faith to be a cause and hope as its effect. Light of day, eh? Not quite. This might be an important clue. I have to reason whether faith is the cause and hope is the effect, all by myself. I have felt that hope is inbuilt and have described this in detail elsewhere. We are naturally inclined to be hopeful. Does that apply to faith as well? Are we born with it? Am I not admitting that I am such a hopeful person only because of faith? Is this plausible? Quite a contradiction! More later.

On hope and dying

2010-01-05T16:00:00.029-05:00

I feel this is an important post, a by product of many months of dedicated thought, reading, feeling, introspection, reasoning and watching all the relevant movies. There is much to be written about - it is very much incomplete and was hastily put up online out of a need to keep some of the thoughts alive and to keep refreshing my memory. It concerns man and this abstract notion called 'hope'. Before you go on - I recommend reading 'The Stranger' by Albert Camus and watching the following movies, many times over, if need be and think seriously about every sentence, scene, song lyric and meaning and apply that to your life.
1. No country for old men
2. O brother where art thou
3. A serious man
Each of these movies is a Coen brothers' masterpiece dealing with a host of issues, moral questions and more importantly the emphasis on hope and death. How does one face one's own demise? Should it be through a reliance on God? On religion ? On what? What happens when all truth becomes lies and there is no hope, absolutely no hope? What next? What is keeping us afloat right now? When you are old and get cancer/heart disease, what are you going to tell yourself about your impending death? How are you going to face this terrifying ordeal, quoting Mersault in The Stranger.
To give you a few examples about hope's importance- let me give you a snapshot of some of my current thoughts - I am hoping secretly, dreaming even that I get to be with this pretty girl with whom I had a minor connection many, many years back, hopes for a job, for love, for a whole bunch of things, many of them being quite unrealistic, to say the very least. Most of these hopes are not even in my consciousness. But, I know they exist. Everything that is keeping me afloat is some form of hope. I live in denial of my death, by hoping and telling myself I have another 30 odd years to live, with hope that there is enough time. As time goes on however, my state of denial does not change. I believed 10 years back that I would not die soon and the exact same hope lives on. I secretly believe/hope I will probably not change for another 100 years. In reality the 'when' one dies does not matter. Hope, however, leads me on. Hope for self protection, hope for an interesting life, hopes for a gazillion other things keep me going. I hope that I control my own path in life and beyond, with not much thought or much capacity to know about the 'beyond'. All this while I discount the fact that life controls me and surely I do not hold the trump cards in this matter. I do not have a say. The vagaries of life will also have their say on everything that lies between now and my dying, just as it happens in those movies.
My mom believes that when she dies, she is, rather her soul, is going to be magically transported to this mystical planet created for her by a spiritual guru. Other people I know want their soul to be carried to heaven/hell. Some others believe they are just reborn. Death is just the beginning, eh? The root of many of these ideas can be traced back to 'hope'. When you hope and believe in permanence of the soul, what else do you need sustenance from to live out the remainder of your life? Your body and mind will be literally breaking apart and yet you will survive till you die, cling on and swim in a pond of hope. There will be bad days and uncertainties, possible ups and downs in your belief system, but with some luck you may not survive too long.

Camus describes an alternate method to face death, one that feels right, for now. It is that of knowing that life is hopeless, sticking to this idea with surety, and hence liberating yourself of the pain of death. Mersault is sure about the non-existence of god and gives up every little bit of hope in his life. What is surprising is that while he goes through his ordeal and a lot of pain, he does not find despair at the very end. When one consciously and willingly gives up all hope, is there really no pain and suffering in the end? Possibly not, but there is definitely less suffering that is felt than when we are holding onto hope and watching the rug being pulled from underneath us. As Chigurh in No country for old men quips- 'Of what use is the rule you followed, if it brought you to this'?

On boxes that can speak

2008-11-06T09:59:00.024-05:00

One might think that when you need to mail a box, you toss in the contents, close it, stick tape, attach all the address labels and after you pay the fee one hardly need to think about it before it arrives at its destination. But this particular box was unlike any that I knew of. Not only did this box go missing for a full two months after it was mailed due to an undeliverable address, but when it resurfaced and after I got the box back, it actually spoke about its journey like no other box I know of. I also had to fight with all my strength to get it back, plead with every unsuspecting mailman at my door and make dozens of calls to the mail retention center or the place where all dead mail goes- mail that can be dead but can still sometimes speak a tale, if only one strains their ears enough. I had filled the box up with random contents from my past, memorabilia, file folders that had carried unread articles from many a PhD dissertation; books that were printed using typewriters of a bygone era, from professors who had been unsuccessful in publishing them and had simply given them away, palmed off on unwitting students who had shown the slightest interest. In the box was also that single book for which I had sought out the missing box and would keep on fighting to get it back; every other content of the box was quite dispensable. The book is one of those classics, gifted to me by a long gone girlfriend, her slanted handwriting on the first page, good will and wishes still speak of her affections when she penned the note. The after effects of love can endure for much longer than lady love herself. Ah! Going back to the box, we should not digress here- the box spoke of an unbelievably long, battered, tortured journey- It was ripped apart with so many tons of mailman's blue tape that the 'white' - the original color of the box was no longer visible. It was incredibly soft, quite unlike any other cardboard I have ever seen- must have been dragged on a dolly in moderately heavy rain and subsequently left to dry in a languid afternoon sun that is so typical of humid days around here. Wetness that stifles and lingers, refuses to go away even within an oven, perhaps. The box that had once been proudly rectangular, sharp so to speak, was now bulging to the extent that it was now oval, almost like a over sized, blue football, one that was wee bit too heavy to be thrown around in a game though. It was almost ready to burst in despair, reminding me of an overfilled stomach that cannot digest. Address labels had been ripped apart and reattached many times over; no one did know where the box was supposed to go anyway. The only thing that must have helped it reach me was this green tracking label which I had attached merely out of habit for I do not pinch pennies or dollars for that matter. When I removed the tape to inspect the insides of the box and its contents, there were also these large gaping holes, large gashes that one could see through, gashes that were a mark of a brutal contempt for its being, rips that were probably caused by the sharp edges of the same dolly that carried the box through the rain. This also explained all the need for the extra blue taping in the first place. Holes need to be patched up, covered up to dissuade people from taking a peek, just to control their utterly voyeuristic instincts. Some boxes can speak of unspeakable things as well, mine sure did. In the end, after I had removed and put away all its contents, precious book inclusive, I trashed the box. Sadly, the box had absolutely no possibility of a reuse. There was no need for a funeral or a wake for that matter. It had simply played its story to me, possibly just once and then the tape ended, abruptly.

Of mirrors of the self

2008-10-19T15:37:00.006-04:00

He mirrors your estimate of him. What you see of him is sometimes nothing but a reflection of whatever it is you want to see. If you are that person who sees trust and honesty and all virtues- all things beautiful, that is what you will get, much to your happiness, fulfillment and growth. Conversely, if it is baseness that you seek within him, you may only just see that. He may do nothing to change your mind, nothing at all to affect your free will, even when he seeks you out.

Melancholy notes and a harbinger of moths

2008-10-01T23:16:00.012-04:00

Tonight, I was watching one of the truly melancholy songs from the past-" Where have all the flowers gone" performed by a quartet; one of the singers was actually the person who wrote the song. I am sitting at my dining table and I see this moth flying around near the corner of the room. I am reminded of Woolf seeing the moth on a window sill, that she uses to describe the inevitability of death so vividly, in a matter of fact fashion, in one of her essays. I see opportunity here. I do nothing, absolutely nothing. For a while, I stay still and continue to enjoy watching the moth flit around with the corner of my eyes. In an impulsive turn of events and in the grip of masquerading a solemnly artistic gesture, I raise my hands, wave and wish for the moth to fly to me, so I could have a closer look at the dark winged friendly visitor. Guess what! It happened! She flew and decided to settle right on my palm! It literally made my evening! In the end, she did not want to leave, even after I had had the pleasure of her company for a good few minutes, and I was summarily obliged to gently send her on her way!

Of teenagers unasked for

2008-09-20T12:04:00.015-04:00

The teenager that flashes across me is nothing but a facade, an impermanence - a snowflake that melts as soon as it hits dry ground. That part of me will die a slow seething, timely death, if it is not nurtured; not allowed to grow and blossom and take its rightful place- on a shelf of my past pictures and memories. One needs to peer deeper into me to see the adult, the strength of my self that radiates from within, an adult that raised his head a long time before the teenager had even tried disappearing back into the darkness of the womb, where it started.

Of incomplete truths

2008-09-08T23:26:00.008-04:00

There are complete truths and there are truths that are revealed or known only partially. Many things make more sense only when truths are completely known though. What one needs to do next arises naturally out of knowing completeness. Partial truth is imperfect.

Chapels and choices

2008-09-08T10:34:00.005-04:00

Skipped a stone, a beat, a heart
and the chapel stony-faced.

A girl, the eyes, a sparkle
the storm, the night, an aisle.

She longed, she knew, her voice
the choice, she had not but made.

Her pain, his angst, the rain
and a wish that stayed alive.

Of passing storms

2008-09-07T01:56:00.032-04:00

Their hearts fluttered as one, flitted about like tiny, colorful insects twisting and turning at night time. Her big, dark brown eyes shone with those extraordinarily sudden flashes of brightness, flickered and glowed as they waited for Mike to take the stage. It must have really been some moment; some moment while a storm raged outside, inside and just about everywhere. Soul mates are sometimes born in such moments, moments of lull, of extraordinary peace, of happiness in the hard hitting rain. The unsaid appeared too, as patches, as pock marks of an unfinished painting job, out of nowhere and repeatedly asked the same weighty yet flippant questions, over and over. Could he have repeated his exact same proposal asking her to be with him? Would she have said yes this time around? He definitely saw the glimmers of hope and happiness with this girl. She was clearly seeing it too. She was definitely not blind. But, had she not had enough of these charades, enough of a determined unwillingness to listen to her own heart? His problem was this- see as far as he did, he did not dare take her all the way to what he saw. He did not have an option but to lead her only as far as he should; he could not venture further. It was not a time to have his way and thereby transgress on her individual choice. His word was definitely not the law of the land. Besides, love like all else, is decidedly reciprocal. He could and he would fight for her, but only if she stepped forward, realized his worth, gave herself up and not tried to run away; not tried to push him to the back of her head and hope to forget it all; tried to forget that they even existed. She just needed to fight for him instead. She was just letting extraneous things creep in, get in the way of a fabulous relationship. She needed to slow down and learn to feel, learn to understand a relationship instead of being torn by it. He had already let go, let her go find her own will, her strength and find out for herself where her deepest desires and happiness lay. She just needed to find her way back home, because home is where heart is.

Of things less talked about

2008-08-31T12:12:00.014-04:00

Invariably, there comes a time in man's life when there is nothing, absolutely nothing to hold on to, no hope, no happiness and when he cannot even hold onto himself! The mind fails and he is left with a body that started to flounder long before his mind. Broken, maimed, battered and diseased, he literally trudges on, sometimes in malodorous bogs and mires. He takes a beating from life itself. Passe are memories, friendships, soul mates, loved ones and surely all those other empty objects of material desire. It is one life and it ends right there- no explanations, no afterlife, nothing to carry on and almost surely his history disappears as well, from whence it never started. It vanishes in a few blinks - blood, sinew and all. But it is not terrible, not bad at all. If you think about it- mortality sometimes makes life bearable. It is after all a short time in a single life. Make what you can, the most of it, for you cannot live it again and actually at the end of it all- one may not want to either!

Of games and imagination

2008-08-05T10:54:00.009-04:00

Lets play a game. Can you do this? Can you imagine yourself being in a place that you have never been to? Here are a set of rules for the game. Okay, I will keep it simple. There is just ONE rule:

Rule # 1. It cannot be any combination of any place you have been to in your entire life, seen or heard of, ever and you have to be honest with yourself.

Oh well, Let me toss in another, for just the heck of it.
Rule # 2. Can you imagine such a place painted with a color that you have not seen?

It is alright if you worry about just Rule # 1 and choose to disregard Rule #2, for now.

Is this what architects try to do?

The mystical Penn

2008-07-29T13:48:00.007-04:00

I was planning on going back to the lab last night, but started to watch one of my favorite movies on amc- Mystic river. Every time I have seen that movie, I see something more, absorb a little something more, peel away a few more layers on Sean Penn's inscrutable face. That is what is so good about it. There is so much more than what meets my untrained and inexperienced eye. Gosh! He is definitely one of the most remarkable actors of our time.

On carrots and sticks

2008-07-25T10:02:00.013-04:00

Please do NOT dangle 'happiness' on a stick in front of you and try chasing it. It is futile. You will end up running behind it, pursuing it, touching it on its periphery and sometimes, much to your disappointment, may even skirt it altogether. Rather, it is better if you try walking alongside it, stay within its sphere of influence, ensconced in it all the while, while you prance about your daily life. Going back to the stick, what should really be on it, is something entirely different- hope! Toy with it in every way you want to!! It should always be there right in front of you.

Dust to Dust?

2008-03-22T14:34:00.007-04:00

You are not the only one who had this dilemma, these anxiety-riddled sets of questions that need to be answered and turned in before the clock ticks eleven. There were others who were tested. What you are thinking is probably not the first time that the thought occured to someone. The answers that you have, came to someone else too. The fact that you will act upon your thoughts and do exactly the same thing comes as no surprise either. What happened to them is bound to happen to you. Your fate has played over and over, an unbroken line for centuries and millenia, before you even arrived. Look not just to the future, but tune into the past as well. Surely, it is all tied together.

And then there was ‘God’

2006-12-24T19:21:00.000-05:00

The tame bird was in a cage, the free bird was in the forest.
They met when the time came, it was a decree of fate.
The free bird cries, "O my love, let us fly to the wood."
The cage bird whispers, "Come hither, let us both live in the cage."
Says the free bird, "Among bars, where is there room to spread one's wings?"
"Alas," cries the caged bird, "I should not know where to sit perched in the sky."

The free bird cries, "My darling, sing the songs of the woodlands."
The cage bird sings, "Sit by my side, I'll teach you the speech of the learned."
The forest bird cries, "No, ah no! songs can never be taught."
The cage bird says, "Alas for me, I know not the songs of the woodlands."

There love is intense with longing, but they never can fly wing to wing.
Through the bars of the cage they look, and vain is their wish to know each other.
They flutter their wings in yearning, and sing, "Come closer, my love!"
The free bird cries, "It cannot be, I fear the closed doors of the cage."
The cage bird whispers, "Alas, my wings are powerless and dead."
- Rabindranath Tagore

My ever eroding faith in 'God' says to me that it will exact its revenge by reappearing and reaffirming itself within me, in time. I am more inclined to say, in a phony British accent- 'Thank you very much and good bye.' I think I can say that it has given me all that it has to offer, for now. Religion and faith played a humungous role in my upbringing and to shake off their vestiges took time and effort, in numerous ways. A friend recently asked me if it takes as much effort to stay away from faith as it does to stay within its confines. Depending on a number of 'environmental factors' such as how much religion has been fed into you and how much you absorbed when you were young and also depending on your personality, it does take effort not to pray to 'God'. Initially, resisting an impulse to pray was extremely hard. At the first sign of trouble, it used to be an SOS! But with time, I have been able to not do that, also with a lot more conviction. I think that if I did not break free now, I could not have broken free later. So, the degodification had to be done, at the earliest. It had to happen. Why? Why would anyone put themselves through that extra trouble to go in the opposite direction? Most people follow one religion or the other, for a variety of compelling reasons. Humans are fallible; it makes sense to depend on something that you would rather believe in, at a deeply personal level, to support you, nurture and insulate you against the sledge hammer that life sometimes chooses to be. If the sole purpose for your faith is to reserve a business class seat to heaven- Good luck! I stick to earth, this special place to which I am so attached. However, I will not pass judgments against 'God' and the 'God fearing', not because I am afraid one of those myriad Hindu gods will choose to poke me in my butt, with their favorite weapon of choice, but because faith is something that is extremely personal and not to be interfered with. Besides, I think that ‘God’, if it/he/she exists, has to be one that is forgiving. I seem to be contradicting my views here but bear with me on this for now. I will also add this- I will be tempted but I will not suggest therapy for you if 'God' actually talks to you. My reasoning is that if faith is a factor that is sustaining you and making life less miserable, by all means you can keep it intact and be happy.
Contrary to what a few people like to say, I do not think that Science and religion reconcile themselves in the distant horizon that your eye barely sees. I say man created ‘God’ and it could not have been in any other way and I give him/her all the due credit for that wonderful idea. We are also such wonderful creatures, so full of conflicts, so full of beauty, so full of IT and so little that we know. It made sense to invent a faith to supplement our very meager diets, incomes, assets and securities. Ah, that would be insecurities! It made sense to fill an empty pitcher with ‘faith’ and drink up the concocted concoction. Am I Ivan Karamazov, the purely rational being whose reasoning leads to evil and also to the denial of a 'God'? Maybe. Maybe not. More on this later...

Eyes Wide Open and a Dark Chocolate Sky

2006-07-25T02:00:00.000-04:00

Last week I had the oppurtunity to write a 5 page essay on the central themes/characters of two movies for my roommate who happens to be taking a class on film and theater this semester. Why not update my blog as well? The first movie that I picked was Eyes Wide Shut, which is really one of my favourite movies, not just for all its unbridled eroticism but also for the genius of the director who kept me engrossed throughout. The other- Vanilla Sky really does not deserve a lot of attention, but it still did serve as something to write about. So here goes. Read on...

Stanley Kubricks’ Eyes Wide Shut is one of the masterpieces of postmodernist cinema. Taboos, conventional mores, ethical standards, moral relativism, sexual freedom, are all dealt with beautifully with in the context of this movie, thus raising some very interesting questions. One is left to try and answer each of these questions to the best of our abilities and subjective opinions. Each situation in the movie gives deep insights into the inner trappings of a couple, desires - sexual and otherwise. Cameron Crowe’s Vanilla Sky is another movie which deserves similar scrutiny. This article examines the portrayal of the protagonists in these movies, both of which are coincidentally played by Tom Cruise.
In Eyes Wide Shut, Tom Cruise plays an affluent doctor with a private practice, married to Nicole Kidman and father to a child, a stereotypical family in a number of ways. It starts with Cruise and Kidman trapped in a conventionally defined marriage, attending a high society party in which both Cruise and Kidman are subjected to various degrees of sexual temptation. Although, they are not shown as yielding to those in reality, there are plenty of indications which point to the transgressions of their minds, all of which points to infidelity. When they get back from the party, Kidman starts smoking marijuana and starts to question Cruise deeply with some very fundamental questions about his understanding of women, his fidelity, and his ethical and sexual morality when he examines nude women in his clinic, her attraction to another man while they were still married- all of which serve to throw Cruise’s assumed understanding of her feelings towards him into a complete disarray. Immediately following this, Cruise visits a family grieving the death of his former patient when he is subjected to a situation where dead person’s daughter confides her strong affections towards him. One is left in sheer admiration of the rationale of the director when he chooses to juxtapose death and a sexual encounter. The grief and unavoidability of death that we face as mortals is in stark contrast to the emotional and physical fulfillment associated with sex. In the very next scene, even as he is still grappling with his ideas of Kidman’s infidelity, he encounters a solicitation by a prostitute, to which he almost accedes, when a phone call from Kidman stops him from indulging in the actual act of sex. The prostitute is later shown to contract HIV. Although incidental to the central plot, he narrowly escapes possible infection. There is no letting down in his emotional stress levels. As the thriller-drama progresses, we see Cruise question every tiny desire of his, in relation to his marriage, as accentuated by numerous situations at hand - his ethical responsibility as a doctor examining a nude person who has had a drug overdose; the scene when he goes to rent a tuxedo when he faces a father willing to sell a daughter into prostitution. Later, Cruise also views an esoteric sexual orgy, at the end of which he suffers a severe psychological intimidation when he is forced to remove his mask and expose himself to many others, who are still masked and supposedly form the powerful elite in the society. The scene also elucidates a number of conflicts that society has within itself - such as its fascination and simultaneous abhorrence of acts of sexual perversion, as shown from the secrecy of the entire event, while it is in fact very well attended.
In Eyes Wide Shut, there is an all pervading air of doom and secrecy throughout. The background musical score for the movie, which is always dark, lends an ominous and foreboding air to all the events. Even Cruise’s physical well-being apparently comes under threat after his gate-crashing the orgy; his friend who informs him of the orgy is mysteriously beaten and suddenly disappears from his hotel; the girl who helps him at the orgy ends up dead in a morgue apparently due to a drug overdose. In the end however, the director chooses to leave us with an open ended question as to the fate of the marriage. One is led to believe that it survives for the moment, if not ‘forever’ as Kidman puts it, realizing that their transgressions were unreal and incomplete for most part.
In Vanilla Sky, the protagonist Tom Cruise again, starts as an affluent son perennially under the shadow of a dominant industrialist father. Initially, he is shown as a prodigal person who does not have to face the trials and tribulations of common man, never has any serious questions to ponder over. He suddenly faces a brutal accident due to the self-inflicting suicidal nature of his sexual partner Cameron Diaz, who is also shown as a selfish stalker. His physical appearance and beauty is effaced and his life turns upside down. Doctors do not have a solution for putting back his face together. He starts to see the degradation of his personal identity. He struggles with affronts in a club, the disintegration of his personal relationship with his best friend Jason Lee, whom he suspects is involved with Penelope Cruz, the girl of his dreams. Tom Cruise becomes slowly and steadily self-absorbed, introverted and finally a social outcast. He goes through numerous alternating real and surreal situations in which he fails to distinguish between Penelope Cruz and Cameron Diaz. This could possibly be a hint at a subliminal feeling of guilt towards Cameron Diaz, whom he routinely uses only for sex. The film continues to shows the complete progressive devastation of an individual due to the traumatic nature of his injury. Tom Cruise is helped in numerous ways by a therapist - Kurt Russell, in making sense of the situation whereas in Eyes Wide Shut, he is helped more by an internal monologue that sorts through his doubts and longings. Both characters have a tremendous emphasis on man’s internal longings and fears.
In Vanilla Sky, Tom Cruise is shown to have desperate nightmares. Even though all of these incidents are shown later to be unreal in the form of his agreement with a company that preserves people in a lucid dream for eternity, we are left with central questions that they ask. Ultimately, he is faced with a crucial choice of either continuing with his dream where all his wishes are fulfilled according to a preset computer program or to give up the dream and go back to reality, where he has to fight destiny. He picks reality over the dream, ready to face life for what it is, in stark contrast to the wasteful and superficial person that he is before the accident.
After the entire trauma that they go through, both characters are unsure if they really experienced all that they did. In Eyes Wide Shut, Cruise ends up asking if he really did stray from marriage, the extent of Kidman’s infidelity, if he was actually threatened with his life for his participation in the orgy. In Vanilla Sky, a similar event happens in the form of his becoming a part of a dream offered by a company that has preserved his mortal body for long. There are more parallels between the two characters. Both go through severe psychological stresses both from the society as well as from within, eventually leading to a breakdown. In Eyes Wide Shut, Cruise’s emotional breakdown is marked by his weeping confession to Kidman. In Vanilla Sky, even in his dream, Cruise becomes increasingly disconsolate and reaches mental breakdown with the murder of the woman he loves. Both question certain fundamental ideas about life, beauty and sex. Other facets- such as our trust in fellow human beings and in ourselves are also amply scrutinized. Both sometimes lay threadbare a callous, negative image of the affluent sections of our modern society, devoid of any idealism. Any idealism that might in fact be present is obscured completely by the portrayal of the characters. Love is not seen as answer to any question. Both characters navigate through most of man’s base feelings of hatred, envy and lust without any remorse, pointing to a strong postmodernist influence. Crowe’s Vanilla Sky also explores seemingly existential questions about the protagonist’s happiness. Both movies use masks to protect identities and emotions as well as to stress on non-facial gestures.
Both film makers, through these brilliant character portrayals, have exposed us to a number of questions, some of which are fundamental in helping us wade through the complexity of life. The plots, even though seemingly convoluted are in fact masterpieces. The central characters in both cases have common threads, thought processes- some of which run in the background while they continue to face the vicissitudes of life. Rarely does contemporary film making leave such an indelible mark, as these two films did.

Down to earth battles of a different kind

2006-06-18T05:29:00.000-04:00

Yaha! We made the best of the world cup soccer ferver by actually playing! About two days back, I had one of my cravings to go out and buy something nice. What better to get than a shiny new, size 5 adidas soccer ball- with FIFA approved size and weight. It really is a thing of beauty, with the air within, of course. An added indulgence was a set of 4 orange marker cones to serve as goal posts- bags and books being a thing of the past. However, the matter of fact is that no amount of admiration for a soccer ball can match the actual act of playing. A bunch of us got together today and satisfied what I think is one of my most primitive urges. I soared high as the ball did, the difference being that I never came back to the earth while the ball was forced to follow its cyclical fortunes- against its wishes maybe. Every kick was ecstacy and every goal was an act of God. Every shove had an objective and every throw in had a profound meaning and its own special purpose on the face of the earth. In the deepest of my imaginations, there were also the dead and departed ghosts of previous soccer players, ones who had graced the field before us, standing by the sideline- cheering us, waving to us, begging to be included in a very much mortal team. Long live mankind, Long live soccer!

The color is grey

2006-05-22T03:50:00.000-04:00

We seek definitions. One sweep of a black brush on a canvas and lo behold- we have a tree, a river with sharp banks, a house that can withstand a 20.00 seismic tremor. We need refuge from the intimidating and blurry reality, the overwhelming din of which seeks to shake the roots of our existence in this world. And so we need exactness, precision and discreteness. We need to be comforted. We draw lines, boundaries around emotions, sexual orientations, relationships, love, comfort zones- of the ‘you cannot enter types’, sharper and more permanent steel knives, of barbed wires that hold us down to the solid earth, lest gravity fail from doing its wonderful job, marriages and divorce decrees that are doled out by staid looking courthouses. We judge- She is right, that is wrong - thank your polycarbonate glasses - you poor astigmatics and myopics. Even the shadows are sharp; the objects that cast them in the first place are now sharper. I look at the diffuse glow from a soft white bulb- alas I can see the edge where the bulb ends and the cooler air takes over. Maybe morning will be kinder and I can gaze at the horizon and know that the lines are merely by-products of our colorful and vivid imaginations.

Citius—Altius—Fortius- Yeah! Why not?

2006-02-28T20:00:00.000-05:00

I went for lunch with a really prominent scientist of our time- Dr. Allan Hoffman, courtesy my advisor Dr. Tyler! If she qualifies as his academic grand daughter, I qualify as one of his many great grand children, academic, of course. After his invited lecture on smart polymers, we went up a hill to the Pointe, a nice restaurant with an amazing view of the Salt Lake valley. Over lunch, we discussed questions relevant to research and a host of other things. You get inspired if you feel like getting inspired, one could say and pooh pooh anything- not this scientist though. He is 75 and has had a hip replacement and yet he works and collaborates in ground breaking research. I could talk volumes about him and his work, but I will let you do a little googling and find out for yourself!

Aaah!

2005-12-30T02:06:00.000-05:00

I was at a place called Weeping rock, down south in Zion National Park, UT. Ground water that percolates into the sandstone of the hills, encounters impermeable shale which forces it to come out of the face of the cliff. Thus, droplets fall from the edge of a very high cliff making the rock ‘weep’. The setting and disappearing sun behind the Angel’s landing, another high point, did the most amazing thing to the falling water. For a few minutes, I could see those large, seemingly spherical droplets, fall off the cliff, shimmer, sparkle, rotate and do the most wonderful things, before they slowly fell to the earth; each one! Perfection has many forms; this was undoubtedly one of those.

2005-09-25T15:26:00.000-04:00

With beauty before me I walk;
With beauty behind me I walk;
With beauty above me I walk;
With beauty below me I walk;
With beauty all around me I walk;
With beauty within me I walk;
It is finished in beauty.

- Navajo night chant

moi

2004-12-23T14:21:00.000-05:00

Cycles of love,
cycles of hate,
Of sweet tender trust;
you spun me around and round,
on tops of flaming gold.
Rolling heads, twinkling eyes
and before we winked,
the storm had passed;
my boat was aground,
with a bruised crab shell,
and a not so empty net.

Whoa whoa, what am I doing here?? For me, poems are strictly outbursts into unknown territories that are marked by vicious and hungry canines; I need to get back to the familiar rigidity of soothing and very structured prose before its too late! Sometimes stifling an idea or two is required for my general well being!

Humanity Lost?

2004-10-29T02:38:00.000-04:00

Is the war in Iraq really justified? This is a question that is haunting many of us with no easy answers in sight. Are some of us really waiting for the future to decide whether it was right or wrong? In this war, thousands of people have already ceased to live; innumerable have been left wounded and needless to say, many others have been affected in other profound ways, just as in any other war. It might be that there are no answers to a more peaceful world because humanity might be inherently flawed and we are incapable of finding peace within ourselves and with others, but a strong foundation based on love and non-violence is the key to start working towards any semblance of a solution. Love begets love and the same rule unfortunately applies to war as well. More than 50 years back, Gandhi outlined and successfully applied his ideas of a non-violent struggle for the independence of India. Initially, this did not strike me as being any good. It was just another history lesson that was learned by rote and almost immediately forgotten, without a second thought. In fact, in one of his more outrageous methods for resistance, people would just stand passively and get beaten, 'lathi-charged' as it was then called, without trying to hit back. But all these seemingly impossible and ridiculous schemes did work, patience paid and India won an independence that still stands out because of the manner in which it was achieved. Looking in this different light, Gandhi’s path was extremely arduous, but was in fact due to a superior ideology. We might think that such an independence movement of the past is not pertinent to the issue at hand and is out of context; maybe it really is not relevant in a complete sense. However, such a past, in spite of it being mutable, is invaluable to us from what lessons it has to offer and these lessons can be easily overlooked and sidelined if we do not cull the universal message of love, compassion and non-violence that is espoused in them. If we sift through all of these lessons carefully enough, who knows, we might find a solution, just as Gandhi did, one that is more humanitarian; at least the next time around that we are faced with a choice of having to go to a war, especially one that is preemptive.