Fuel for my words ?

If there’s a place called “limbo” for real, it has to be this one, the one I live in right now. Its directionless; neither a happy nor a sad one; pretty much the stop-start mornings; idle, lethargic afternoons; vacant evenings, and long, tiring nights; this is a lazy place and its pretty much as meaningless as “vovomp” is (although I believe vovomp will have its fair share of google results). I don’t know how things led to other things, which finally led to my being here, but here I am, and there’s no reason to believe this is going anywhere.

In this place, you’re a procrastinator to dreaming; your work just passes you by; unmotivated, too tired to act, you walk around, laugh as people do, cringe when it comes to doing anything you don’t like; nothing amuses you anyways, you’re just putting up a smile, just so that you don’t seem to be outside. You have no thoughts on your future, in fact it scares you; you have no interest looking back into the past because it doesn’t hold anything you’d want to go back to; and the present, the present is just existence, gliding through time, ticking the seconds, the minutes and the hours by; from one eerie Floyd to another, as days come and go, from one weekend to another, from one guilt-ridden morning after a night of “binging” to another;  endless, recurring, endless

By now, it must be clear how difficult it should be putting these thoughts together into words as I write here, given my “condition”; but its time I did, if not for anything/anyone (and most of what people write, has always been about someone or another), just for keeping a record of this time, this place, this moment in this life. In all probability, this piece will make for some very boring reading (for anyone who bothers to read it at all), but then much of what is out there to read, is boring (again, for me, and right now).

I’ll probably end with some words I remember from this movie I happened to watch sometime back, pointless and blunt just like I am right now –

Look out the window. And doesn’t this remind you of when you were in the boat, and then later than night, you were lying, looking up at the ceiling, and the water in your head was not dissimilar from the landscape, and you think to yourself, “Why is it that the landscape is moving, but the boat is still?”

Life, when its passing you by, is as seen from that funny little boat, and the sky is pale blue, and the water, pale and still too.

 

(Disclaimer – All images are snapshots from IGN’s 2010 game Limbo. No copyright violation intended)

Why don’t you smoke?

I’ve come across this question quite a few times, and frankly, the reason is, its purely out of choice. In return, I always come up with, “Why do you smoke ?” And generally, nobody has a clue, as they give me a puzzled, all confident smile.

The reason I’m jumping my ass into this ever controversial tobacco battle tonight is something I witnessed about an hour back. I was inside this grocery store, buying some random stuff, and amongst the small crowd, there was this really cute little girl not more than 6 or 7, buying herself an ice cream. Seemingly her parents had sent her to the shop, just outside the apartments’ gates, to pick her favorite ice cream. I was looking through the rack for the stuff I had come for, while noticing how cute the entire thing seemed as she kept contemplating between the flavors. Just as she finally decided on the dessert she wanted, she went to the counter, and muttered, ” I want this ice cream, and 2 cigarettes “. I was aghast, shocked with complete disbelief. What did this little ice cream girl have to do with cigarettes? The shopkeeper, almost matter-of -factly, handed her the 2 smokes, and she happily exited out.  Just as she was leaving, I asked her, almost calling out, “Aapko cigarette kyu chahiye ?” (Why do you want these cigarettes? ), and in unison with the shopkeeper, she replied, her dad wanted them ! It was just plain, disgusting parenting, and I didn’t know what this kids parents were upto.

But, what happened tonight is obviously not the reason I don’t take to smoking, the reason I don’t is that I have a choice. I have the choice to avoid one of the ways to fall to something as fatal as cancer; I have a choice to keep my lungs clean, be able to maintain good stamina, to keep healthy, and to not slowly, voluntarily kill myself. I have seen and read about innocent people, little kids who’ve had to face life-threatening, and often fatal diseases, for no real faults of their own. Kids, who were born to HIV; people who faced cancer just out of sheer bad luck, whose bodies were messed up from the inside, and they didn’t have a clue about where it came from. I know, just as much as anyone that I could face it tomorrow. But I have this choice today, right now, in this moment, to make it less probable. I have a choice to a healthy life, and I know I’m not the cleanest one around, nor for a moment am I implying, that I don’t have habits that I don’t regret, but this is something, that never caught up to me, and so I plan to keep it that way.

As for that little girl, I really can’t come up with words to express how pathetic I feel about her parents. Your parents are the ones you look up to, especially, more so as kids. They are your role models, the ones you brag about, the ones you protect, the ones you defend, the one who defend you, but parents like hers, are shameless, and to say the least, not worthy for any child to look up to. I am just a young guy myself, but that right there, is something I would never be proud of, as and whenever I become a parent. And, to think that her father send her out at 10 in the night, to buy cigarettes, with the lure of an ice cream, just disgusts me to the core. Think about it, I don’t imply you were to ever do this, but unless you were to quit, you’d never know when it drove you to this !

Life after facebook

– I came across this very hilarious, though true piece somewhere, read on, its super fun !

When I finally decided to put a stop to it, once and for all, I was left with the question bothering everybody: Are you ever truly removed, once and for all?

– Zadie Smith

On September 14^th 2010, 15:26, I committed suicide. For the first time.

Digital suicide. I eliminated my virtual avatar to return to the gritty heaven of reality. Nowadays this includes the realms of the Internet and the Inbox. But Facebook is a different domain, it is the Republic of social networking where friends multiply daily and people one hasn’t seen in years have the audacity to “poke” one. Becoming a citizen means gaining virtual immortality. Suicide is transient; you log out for a while and see if you can life without or outside of fb. If your friends of blood and flesh are many enough friends, good enough friends. If you can go for a day without shouting your status update from the rooftops. If you can find pleasure in a photo that you haven’t uploaded yet.

Yes, I can. I have been digitally dead for eight weeks and counting. I deactivated my facebook profile to re-experience how life used to be before Zuckerberg’s ultra App upgraded society from 1.0 to 2.0. But my avatar remains in the I.C.U., personal data and pictures vegetating in an anonymous data center, awaiting that one specific click.

Poor me

Why did I finish myself off? For one thing my Zuckerbergian existence had been exacerbating a condition that most screenagers have been suffering for years: Clickitis, the obsessive-compulsive clicking from one page to the next for hours, for no good reason. If facebook has had any part in my death then I believe it started with this: killing my time. And, perversely, making me the murderer. The vexing paradox of our times: attention, say the Internet gurus and Work-life-balance consultants, is the most precious resource and yet the Apps that absorb it most efficiently often feel like a perfect waste of time :s To a certain degree then my facebook auto-da-fé was an escape from this paradox – I was tired of my half-life as a clickitic zombie.

The second reason was purely narcissistic: my status updates on which I was wasting so much mental firepower were not generating as much feedback as I was expecting… or needed. Facebook is perfect for succumbing to the Reality TV fantasy that there is always an audience to play to that will reward one’s fancy stunts. Instead of a carrot and a stick there is the comment function. And so poor me felt I was not getting enough attention, which I suspect is what most people secretely feel.

The third motivation was to conduct a social science self-experiment. The standard reply to the question: Are you on facebook? Is A) “No”, followed by a display of incredulity by the facebook member or B) “Yes”, which is the more socially approved response. But never have I heard “Not anymore, my friend”. I wanted to experience this new status, the post-facebook existence.

Distancing act

What initially surprised me the most was how long my impulse to enter status updates survived. For six or seven weeks these little, non-sensical statements kept popping up on the inside of my closed eyelids and I found myself saddened by the demise of my fb avatar. Was my experiment really worth having all these micro-epiphanies go to waste?

The second surprise, a blowtorch to my styrofoam-crafted ego, was that only one or two people made any inquiries about my departure. It seems that the social networking platform exists in a curious middle-distance: once one has vacated the fb premises the close friends have other channels to know that one is alive and kicking, while the mere acquaintances indeed do not care. So going AWOL on Facebook is at most a petite mort, a little death.

I am in week seven or eight now. What hasn’t manifested yet, which I had fully expected, is a sense of disconnectedness. That it would feel bad about not to be up-to-date on what is going on in my friends’ lives on a daily basis and that I would begin feeling removed, isolated. Drifting away from 24/7 social interaction.

Instead my departure from facebook feels like a natural distancing act: no more fretting about comments on my status, no more checking if I am tagged in an unfortunate picture, no more mysterious friend requests. If we want to stay in touch we do it old-school: write an e-mail, make a phone call, go for a drink, even skype. After all, a certain degree of separation is necessary to build a sense of individuality. Jason Lanier, the person closest to being an Internet prophet and author of You are not a gadget, states this concisely:

Different media designs stimulate different potentials in human nature. We shouldn’t seek to make the pack mentality as efficient as possible. We should instead seek to inspire the phenomenon of individual intelligence.

Vitamin C

Trying to figure out my own facebook-less afterlife I read Malcolm Gladwell’s excellent The Revolution will not be twittered and Zadie Smith’s Generation Y. What started looking more and more suspect was the basic description itself: social network. The question I finally arrived at is this: is facebook really social? Isn’t the Republic of facebook where the social comes to die? Did I kill my facebook self to avoid this digital death in life? At times I fear that a 500-million-faced Leviathan has cannibalized the meaning of social: hundreds of passing acquaintances, people one would not even say hello to in public, are clicked into friendship; a living individual is reduced or compressed to a set of data and pictures; if one is not careful one’s personal data becomes a tradable commodity on a vampiric advertising market; there have been lawsuits due to cyber-bullying, one 15-year old UK teen even committing suicide and trolls have been known to upload pictures of dead people. Of course these outcomes are nothing that is inherent within the facebook’s technical infrastructure but it seems that the ease of connecting and presenting which it enables, ends up encouraging human beings’ less virtuous traits: superficiality and a lack of consideration. Gladwell has remarked on this trend towards superficiality:

“Social networks are particularly effective at increasing motivation,” Aaker and Smith write. But that’s not true. Social networks are effective at increasing participation—by lessening the level of motivation that participation requires.

Society is about connecting, yes, but it is not about connecting for connecting’s sake, it is not about establishing as many connections as humanly and digitally possible. Having too many connections these thin bonds become spears on which any healthy sense of self is impaled.

Facebook is good for maintaining one-on-one relationships but society, the social is about more than friendships and staying-in-touch, it is also about assembling collectives, about movements, about people in the streets and in public places. The groups on facebook, everybody knows, are a sham. As Gladwell summarizes it:

The instruments of social media are well suited to making the existing social order more efficient. They are not a natural enemy of the status quo. If you are of the opinion that all the world needs is a little buffing around the edges, this should not trouble you. But if you think that there are still [1950s, Southern USA] lunch counters out there that need integrating it ought to give you pause.

It would be foolish to deny that facebook when used sensibly can be a social glue of sorts: it helps re-discovering a long lost friend, staying in touch with those particular facebook friends that are actually also friends in reality, inviting people to a real-life social events, etc. Zuckerberg is neither a savior nor a heartless demon as portrayed in Fincher’s movie but his Republic can be a force to connect people.

Yet personally, I do experience my facebook departure as beneficial: I have the freedom to imagine, perhaps nostalgically, what my friends are doing at present, without being force-fed the hard facts, I am more aware of who I stay in touch with and how, I actually do spend my time more sensibly and I feel a bit “more natural” because I feel no urge to tinker around with a profile that anyway will never be capable of representing me adequately as an individual.

But this is not a declaration of definitive digital death. After all, even my own ressurection is just a single click away.

Yeh Saali Zindagi

YSZ is not really refreshing, its not something we haven’t already been coming across with all the smart Indian flicks these days, but where it does captivate you is its strong dialog, the inter-twined fates of its characters, and some really brave character acting. And to that you can add a little bit of Irrfan Khan!

The story is about 2 Delhi goons, Arun (Irrfan, who is more of a corporate thug cum gangster) and Kuldeep (Arunoday Singh, your perfect Purani-Dilli gang member), who are desperately both in love, or rather trying to win their love back, and at the same time, entangled with their dirty money jobs. Their love interests are played by Chitrangda Singh (Priti, who waits for Arun to propose, and waiting too long, starts dating another guy) and Aditi Rao ( Kuldeep’s wife, who’s irritated by his dirty work, but extremely passionate about him ). The story keeps flirting between undertones ofobsession, crime, extortion, cheating and gang brawls, all of the while, with some really witty humor sprinkled all over by some of the best raw dialog of recent times.

While the genre is a familiar one, director Sudhir Mishra’s treatment is refreshingly zany. In place of gloss and gimmicks, he goes for the brash brutalities of love and lost love with layers of inter-twined protagonists with dedicated precision and subtext. But, the real deal-clincher is the very real-world ( full of everyday abuse ) dialog, arguably better than the likes of Kaminey ( although I don’t remember watching that movie ), and full of stimulating wit, which keeps you hungry for its next bit all the time. The background score  is well in sync with the storyline, with some really hilarious/sensuous themes packed along with the fast paced Dilli music.

It is a fast-paced black comedy, that made the multiplex audiences go hooting last night, so it has to be worth the dime, and a little more. Irrfan Khan is once again, back to his best, and Chitrangda Singh really keeps catching the eye. This would probably be my first Bollywood review, so I guess watch it for that !

Rating – 8/10

Little Seeping Thoughts

Sometimes you drift into things you’ve wanted to avoid for a long, long time. You want to just find out a little bit more, go that little bit further, when your mind says to stop, but you really can’t stop. You know it’ll burn you eventually, but its just sweet enough to take the burns. They’re thoughts that just keep seeping through your system, slowly, relentlessly.

You had vowed to never take that road again, and you can already see the futility it is leading to, and you start expecting things you know won’t surface. And you wait, and you wait.

And you get the same outcomes. Instead, Peace out, don’t wait, burn the bridges behind you, and if you had burned them already, don’t try to create them again.

Vegan

( OK, I’ve been told that vegan is an extreme form of vegetarianism; no milk,yogurt et al; by a few of you. So, thanks for that. Won’t be changing the title here though )

I decided to go vegan for a month, this Monday evening. Its been 4 days of February now, and its not been all that bad.

Why? What does it bring to the plate? For starters, haven’t been feeling good about myself for quite sometime now. Its been a lots of things, but I figured I needed to take a stand on something, to apply method, to turn the corner probably. So with that, and also probably because I felt I had been consuming too much of the meat these past 6 months, I decided to stop.

Vegetarianism as a habit comes to us naturally; yes as humans we’ve always been omnivorous, but the measures our civilizations have gone to, to sow, to wait patiently over the crops, to cultivate, to select and to relish the harvest go a long way in explaining our primal interest in the green diet. It is complete, brings in a lot of variety to the plate, and is above all very healthy. The oft laid criticism is its supposed lacking in the rich protein content, esp. vis-a-vis the muscle build department, where the non-vegetarian alternatives are said to be leaps and bounds ahead. I believe its about selecting your vegetarian diet wisely; indulging in large helpings of legumes, beans, yogurt, and off course-milk. And then again, vegetables are the best supplies of all essential vitamins and minerals, which go a long way in keeping healthy; and all carbohydrates are essentially grains. Lots of energy and well-being there !

Personally, for me, this is just a break from gobbling down on too much meat, at every excuse for a meal. I plan to go back to the more suited 3 non-vegetarian meals a week plan after the month. Do you ever consider your eating patterns? Sometimes, its very enlightening ( not The Enlightenment, NO ) into your general external self. For instance, if you’re a chronic skipper, chances are, you’re either always too hurried, or too high ! If you’re always pushing bytes down your stomach, or looking for something to eat whenever your hands are free, you could be really anxious, the can’t-stay-idle kinds. Look into yourself, your food habits mirror you.

Bon Appetit !

The Enlightenment

Have you ever had this moment, this moment where you’re left dumbstruck, with retrospection, forced to look into yourself, everything you’ve been through, and where you’ve reached? And yet, at that moment you’re a lot more wiser, maybe not so much in actions, but in understanding the reasons, and you know a lot more, so much more.

Two weeks back, I had come home during the weekend, and I was waiting for the elevator, beneath my building. As I stood there, in the monotony of my pathetic little life, three kids came jumping around, discussing something. On listening in, I found out they were discussing their Beyblades ( or Tazzos ) or something. And they were really animated about it, passionate as they could be. Soon after, came in another couple of kids, and this one kid from the latter group started jeering about some particular beyblade he had acquired. All the kids were seemingly awestruck by this new acquisition, when the bully from the original group started shouting, that his beyblade was much cooler than this new one, trying to bring the attention back to himself. A fight ensued with heated shouting, lots of snatching and shoving, and one kid almost coming down to tears. And all this while, I just stood there, shocked, as the elevator door opened and closed on me.

I  stood there because I was dumbstruck, lost for words seeing how passionate these kids were for these little things, while I had become so estranged with the simplicity of life. I was shocked to see how much they could fight over a beyblade, while I had to cope with thousands of frustrations at work, with relationships, betrayals, infatuations, insecurities, expectations, addictions, and the myriad mixtures of the anxieties, moments, the depressions, moments, and the solace-seeking indulgences I had learned to live within. I could see myself, right there, in those kids, in my school days, fighting over Pokemon Tazzos, or Wrestling Cards, or just the simplest things of life. To quote Johnny Cash, “What have I become, my sweetest friend?” Why was life such a struggle now, when it was so simple and happy once? At that precise moment, I could see everything flash right in front of my eyes, and I so desperately wished that those boys never reach here. Their happiness was so real, so pure, unlike my much maligned, broken and superficial laughter.

Haven’t things just become so complicated, that its almost incomprehensible to imagine such naivety ? And, if at that moment, I could just get one wish granted, the wish of my life probably, it would’ve been – take this away god, Give me that back !

And there lied my Nirvana, and that was my Enlightenment.

Movie Review: Themba ( A boy called hope )

First of all, Happy New Years everyone. 🙂

So,  we had decided to go for the Pune International Film Festival this weekend, and I’ll try my best to review all the movies I could go for. Today, this German/South African movie, Themba, was playing at the screen nearest to my place. I had half agreed for it since my friend mentioned it had Jens Lehmann (Yes, the former Arsenal goalie) in it,and basically I love sports movies.

But Themba is so much more than a soccer movie. Its not the best movie ever made, and that would purely be down to the budgets, but its certainly an exhilarating experience, right from the beautiful east-cost South African coast line to the laid back Capetown.Truly, one of the line of those excellent African world cinema features, read Hotel Rwanda, Last King of Scotland, Blood Diamond , et al. Themba, a Xhosa boy who lives with his mom Mandisa  and sister Nomtha in a rural part of the Eastern Cape. They stay in a hut on a hill near Port St. Johns, and the view, like the countryside, is beautiful. But Themba’s dad, Vuyo deserted the family four years ago and their life is a daily struggle. Mandisa takes in former mine worker, Luthando as a lodger. He becomes her lover, so when she loses her job and must travel to Cape Town to find work, Luthando – who drinks to much – stays on to look after the kids. Themba is an extremely talented footballer, but his life is extremely poverty ridden and diseased. But, despite a string of despairing events and hardships, Themba wants to keep fighting for his dream to represent the South African national football team – the Bafana Bafana.  The movie also sends out a lots’ve messages, especially focusing on HIV, and the situation in Africa.

Themba is in no way very original, and we’ve all seen movies about achieving dreams despite adversity, but its beautifully strung together, and the locations and filming are out of the world. Its a sweet little story, but truly a very strong one at that. Watch it for just going through the essence of mesmerizing cinematography once again.

8.5/10 for just the purity of cinema here !