I am back I guess…..
I’m rather pleased with myself! Things seem quite nice actually. The more things seem to be ‘falling apart’ the more they seem to be falling into place.
What I mean is…… well you know what I mean. If you don’t then, my imagination is as good or as bad as yours’! Its been a while since I woke up in the morning “up as a daisy” and so I shalln’t allow it to go waste. So lets talk business. Lets talk about SORRY BHAI.
“Very sorry indeed!”
“Do the words painful and unusual torture mean anything to you!”
Were the reactions I got from some friends who watched the film, one of whom hadn’t slept in 24 hrs. Now you must thing that is no big deal! Yes for me it isn’t. I can make do with 8 hours of sleep over a span of something like 6-7 days and I’m still sane! Well almost sane, for how is one to define sanity. That’s a whole different debate. Lying in bed wondering when a rickety old fan is going to fall on one’s head isn’t exactly sane per say. But then again here I am!
Getting back to SORRY BHAI, being a person of a rather ‘sunny disposition’ I cant help but look at the ‘sunny side’ of things. It was fun! A whole bunch of people who went on a vacation to Mauritius and once they got there, having realized that they have camera, crew and the whole paraphernalia required to make a film decided to do just that while they were at it. Why does everything have to be logical and coherent?! This is what modern existence does to us; turns us in to material causality seeking creatures. Its like what happens when a cat sees a ball roll across the room, it runs after it. Similarly a kid runs after the ball. The ball is what is of any consequence to a child or a cat! But to us “rational beings” the ball is of no consequence but what concerns us is the source of the ball! Why does there have to be a logic or a narrative that connects a sequence of events? May be there is a whole different rationale in operation that we being “material causality seeking rational beings” absolutely fail to understand. Why should one have a character’s dialogues dubbed in bad Hindi when the actor is perfectly capable of delivering the same? Is it anybody’s fault that we find something predictable?
One thing I did realize from watching the film was that had I pursued science after 10+2 , I’d probably have ended up as a physicist trying to make a wooden dog fly, who plays the sax in his free time and fantasizes about women in red flowing strappy gowns. That’s one thing I did “carry home” with me from the “film-watching experience”. Boman Irani was simply brilliant in parts. All those parts being the ones in which it was rather evident that he had been left to his own devices. Sharman Joshi did a good job of looking clueless and lost, which personally I feel wasn’t bad acting at all, it was just true to the character. Shabana Azmi as the cranky mother who’s hit mid-life crisis and has decided that its time she got on a diet was …. Well…. Good I should say. I’ve been on the General motors’ diet and its not what I’d define as pleasant. So as far as I am concerned she has every right to be cranky. I you were living on fruits one day, salads the next, soup another etc. you’d be cranky too and for no reason, this woman at least has reason ( reasonable or not but reason all the same). In the midst of all the doldrums and the heightened psycho-emotional drama the “high water” water mark of the comedy is an exchange between father and son who stand by (at a safe distance) look on at mother and bride to be of well one of the brothers frolicking in the sea. The comic timing was just bang on when Sharman Joshi says “only one of them will return alive”!
Well all in all I wouldn’t say I hated the film. I didn’t love it either and I shalln’t say anything other than that “ It wasn’t bad, may be misunderstood, but not bad.” It was entertaining to say the very least and I came away feeling rather pleased with myself for two reason: a. I abandoned science after 10+2 and took up literature and b. I didn’t invest in shares when I had the chance.

It’s been a while I’ve been planning to do this but somehow never got around to doing it. Each time I would think of a tomorrow when I would get down to business. It’s anyone’s guess that, that particular tomorrow, never came. It is human nature to procrastinate. So can’t actually blame myself. A lot of people have been pestering me to write something; anything. They say it would be a cathartic experience and I would be a saner person if I did. I really don’t know if I could get any more or less saner than I am, but yes, I do miss writing. All of a sudden I find the only things I seem to be writing are academic answers. Not that I’m doing a bad job of them. Just that it’s all I seem to be doing. Reading is another thing I seem to be taken-up with. Read Milan Kundera’s The Book of laughter and forgetting and it was quite an experience I must admit. While reading the book there were many instances when I felt like, it’s rather difficult to describe actually, well let’s just say it wasn’t a very pleasant feeling. Then there were moments when I felt, “Why the hell am I reading this book?” and then others when I felt like the author had lost it! All the laughing and forgetting had gone to his head! One couldn’t blame the man either; imagine living under the conditions people did in the time he wrote. Then there were incidents that would repulse most but intrigued me. May be people are this way. Who knows? I for one felt like I must get out more often. But what struck me when I finally finished the novel was the sheer artistry with which all these bizarre events had be strung together. So much so that when each is viewed in retrospect linked to the other it really didn’t seem all that bizarre after all. What really took me by surprise is that at the end of it all I could relate to the emotions that underlined all these bizarre and not so bizarre events. I could go on, but actually that wasn’t why I began in the first place.
The whole big Idea was to try my hand at writing something. I have always held that poetry comes easier to me than prose. I lack the patience to write prose. That I shall work on. This is something I came-up with last night. I really don’t know if its cathartic and neither do I wish to sit down and make a Freudian analysis of it. A poem doesn’t always have to be about someone, but it has to be about something and more than just one thing.

12th October 2008
11:35pm.

For hours on end

we used to speak

Of things, strange, as,

a faucet leak.

Now all you seem

to do is whine-

“Give me back the

things that were mine.”

Bring me this today

And that tomorrow.

You say I am “Mean”

With endless sorrow!

Not a word I say-

In silence comply.

Because when I ask

You’ll have no reply.