Are you too busy recording, or living?

"We talked about a number of other things—I can’t remember what—and he took a few pictures with his phone, which I thought was lame. I mean, if you’re too busy recording the experience, are you actually having it in the first place?"

- Hari Kunzru, 'Raj, Bohemian'

That's a thought I always have when I see friends of mine take pictures and pictures and pictures at the rate of one every minute almost, when they go out partying. I take pictures too, but not so many, because - and this is why I put in the quote here - if you’re too busy recording the experience, are you actually having it in the first place, as Kunzru says in his great short story that touches on consumerism and the urban socialite's 'hectic' life.

....

Sometimes it is just too tiring to be good.

Clash of the weak-'uns

I love films, Indian and international. Sure, I’ve been seeing a lot of foreign films lately but that’s only because I think the stories some of these tell are fascinating. Film transcends language, if you ask me. Who can watch The Lives of Others, Il Postino or Cinema Paradiso and NOT be amazed by them?

But I’ve noticed the steady improvement in the caliber of Indian films of late too, so its not like I’m becoming a film snob or anything. Whether it is the quite brilliant (in my opinion anyway) Hazaaron Khwahishein Aisi or the more commercial Chak De India or Taare Zameen Par, Indian cinema is undergoing a renaissance in filmmaking. (As an aside, Chak De India and TZP have brilliant websites, unlike the films of yore). There is a whole range of less commercial or borderline arthouse films coming up quietly in India as well, such as Manorama Six Feet Under, No Smoking, Dor, Via Darjeeling (a Rashomon-inspired tale that’s been beautifully adapted to a Bengali setting, scheduled for an April release in India) and Mithya – films which are riding the wave of the multiplex experience and allowing so many more people to watch these films, films that are Good with a capital G. Not just your usual rich-girl-meets-poor-boy, who-overcome-opposition-from-family-and-marry-after-at-least-five songs-of-which-two-must-be-performed-around-trees variety. Heck, some of this sensibility is flowing over into the Yash Raj camp as well, so we have them finally venturing into producing a film like Kabul Express, which was, in their own words, ‘YRF’s first film for an international audience – a new foray into this segment of filmmaking, with many more to come’.

Amidst all this, we have a film like Eklavya-The Royal Guard being the Indian nomination for the Oscars. For all those of you who watch any half-decent non-Indian film on a reasonably regular basis, and those of you who keep track of the Oscar nominations, I have a question: which brainless, money-sucking idiot thought from any angle that a film like that could even cast a shadow on films like the eventual winner, Austria’s The Counterfeiters? I highly suspect that the Film Federation of India’s committee must:

a) not even be interested in films as a hobby, forget as a job

b) be VERY susceptible to corruption and consequently, a rich production house’s dream: you pay, you get nominated – which is tragic for those independent production houses that make honest, good films but don’t have a strong enough financial backing

c) not even really care about this whole issue

I was going through the list of films that India has nominated to the Oscars since 1956. We started out pretty well: Mother India, Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam, slowly moving to Saaransh in 1984 and Parinda (ironically, by the same director who made Eklavya) in 1989. The 1990’s were not too bad, with the glaring exception of Shankar’s Jeans being nominated in 1998. And then from 2000 we started going downhill, with films like Devdas, Paheli and Eklavya, and no nomination in 2003 at all, for whatever political reasons, because I refuse to believe that there were no nomination-worthy films that year.

Of course, I’m sure it has escaped no one’s observation that the last few nominations have all been coming purely from the commercial Hindi film industry, with the exception of Shwaas in 2004 which was did not have that much of a big budget, and was Marathi to boot. Since the 1950’s up to now, we’ve had only about 10 nominated films that were non-Hindi. Regional films are largely ignored, and more often than not have some gems hidden among them that escape the untrained eye, which is what it looks like the film committee have anyway.

So, the questions beg themselves: what are the administrators of the Film Federation of India doing today? What are their priorities? And why has no one made a move on taking them to task?

I wish someone had an answer. Or are we destined, as often happens in Indian politics, to quietly accept what the people in power do?

Of desire and regret

The first time I read this particular poem by Russian poet Vera Pavlova in the New York subway, it stayed in my mind because it reminded me of a little poster that used to be in my grandmother's house in Madras when I was growing up, stuck behind a glass cabinet, that went along the lines of:

The more you study, the more you learn
The more you learn, the more you forget
The more you forget, the less you learn
So why study?

Growing up, I used to think it was quite brilliant and very amusing, and my grandfather used to point to it and laugh whenever I said I had so much to study. I just found out (like right now, thanks to this glorious invention called the internet), that the person who wrote that was someone called Don Akchin. (Thanks, Don!)

And so, the first time I saw the lines below in the subway, I thought they were interesting because of the connect. But of course there is much more to it, in the philosophical sense - it is rather beautiful, I think. The New Yorker even published a set of four poems, of which this is one, by Pavlova earlier this year.

If there is something to desire,
there will be something to regret.
If there is something to regret,
there will be something to recall.
If there is something to recall,
there was nothing to regret.
If there was nothing to regret,
there was nothing to desire.

- Vera Pavlova (b. 1963), translated from the Russian by Steven Seymour

The age conundrum

When you begin thinking of people born after 1984 as 'those kids' and people born between 1970-1980 as closer to your age, that's when you know you're on the wrong side of 25. Ugh!!!!

Must think more along the lines of 'Age is a question of mind over matter. If you don't mind, it doesn't matter.'

Now if only it was easy as the snap of a finger to just believe that!

Freedom

What use is physical freedom if the mind is fettered?

Perfection

If life were perfect, would it be worth living?

Taxes and Hard Work

I was reading a very interesting essay by Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850) on political economy a few days ago. (Thanks to Amit Varma, for the link). It is an excellent treatise on the visible and invisible effects of a law in the economic sphere. Bastiat says that when a law is made or a decree pronounced, very often people see only the immediate effect – the visible one. Those that emerge later following on from this initial effect are invisible, and often more important, and the ability to foresee these are what distinguishes a good economist from a bad one. I will take two points to elaborate on here, that came to my mind after reading the essay. One, how do we know where our tax money is going? This tax issue is something I am picking, because ever since I started paying taxes I have realized certain things. One, that you have no choice in the matter unless you want to be arrested or fined. If you are an honest person, you just have to pay taxes and pray your money is being put to some good use. Because somehow or the other, I believe whether the police is effective or not with respect to guarding the law, they are extremely efficient with regard to finding people who do not pay taxes. And no – evading the law is not something I have tried :-) But, given that I pay tax and I genuinely pray the money is being put to good use, I also have no way of verifying what is being done with my money. And believe me, there are plenty of ways I can put the money to better use if it is not. And I am not talking about shopping, for heaven’s sake! Therefore, I have started thinking, quite over-optimistically, that what the government should do is give tax-paying members of the public an exact break-up of where their hard-earned money is being used. Yeah, I know – HOPES!! The other point relates to hard work. The essay mentions two people who inherit an equal sum of money, but whereas one uses it all in living a luxurious life, soon finding himself without anything to fall back on, the other is a wise investor who lives a decent life and also has some left over for a rainy day. I mention this example because while I am an ardent believer in savings as much as I am in the good life (as long as it harms no one), in this day and age I also see numerous cases where people a) do not save and yet b) have an excellent lifestyle. The reason is that the inheritance they have is enough to fuel their every whim till their dying day and for their kids as well. Inferring from this, a) Their dads did a darn good job of making money, so b) they do not need to even learn how to save, forget saving itself. My question is, is this right or wrong? The previous generation works hard so that the next can live comfortably. But the ‘next’ do not recognize this hard work and think it is their right to use all the money to do all they want. The morals and ethics by which the previous generation got where they are today have no say in the lives of the next because they are already way above where their peers are, without even trying. I think the fault lies in the previous generation. If you do not teach the value of hard work, then there will be no recognition of it. The other possibility is that all the money is black money anyway, so it will obviously be spent on luxuries. Either way, the point is almost the same: if you do no hard work yourself, then your kids will have no desire to do any either. The conclusion of the 33-page essay, where Bastiat quotes what Chateaubriand says of history, is something that almost answers my question: “There are two consequences in history: one immediate and instantaneously recognized; the other distant and unperceived at first. These consequences often contradict each other; the former come from our short-run wisdom, the latter from long-run wisdom. The providential event appears after the human event. Behind men rises God. Deny as much as you wish the Supreme Wisdom, do not believe in its action, dispute over words, call what the common man calls Providence “the force of circumstances” or “reason”; but look at the end of an accomplished fact, and you will see that it has always produced the opposite of what was expected when it has not been founded from the first on morality and justice.” (Chateaubriand, Memoirs from Beyond the Tomb)

Education and literacy

They were all silent, even those who had not committed the sins I had attributed to them. I dismissed the class early, although the culprits and a few others stayed back to plead their case. They were docile even in their pleas: they wanted to be forgiven, they did not know any better, this was what most professors expected. Two were in tears. What could they do? They had never learned any better. From the first day they had set foot in elementary school, they had been told to memorize. They had been told that their own opinions counted for nothing. - Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi How does it feel when you have ideas and thoughts simmering inside you, but you never have the encouragement or the platform to give vent to them? I know what it feels like. In school, when I was mesmerized by the beauty of billowing clouds on a sun-drenched day, or the romance of the pearl-grey sky throwing forth pricks of happy moisture on a hot evening, I often felt privileged and lonely at the same time. Privileged because as anyone with the ‘heart of a poet’ will understand (as years later a friend from college put it), those fleeting moments when Nature is at her resplendent best are genuinely special, and lonely because at the time, poetry to most in my school meant unwelcome lines that you had to mug up to get extra marks in exams. We were never asked to comment on anything, argue or even paraphrase. It went to the extent that Maths – MATHS for heaven’s sake – was sometime learnt by rote. Today when my 16-year-old cousin tells me that mugging is the only way to get marks in exams – and marks are ultimately the deciding factor for admission to college – I start off arguing forcefully about the need for him to actually understand what he is learning, but slowly my energy peters out. Because he is right. I went through the rigmarole of Indian education and he is still at it, years later, and nothing has changed. I have nothing to support my point of view, apart from my passion for what I call ‘real’ education, as opposed to ‘engineered’ literacy. The Indian education system – and by that I mean primarily Indian state examination boards, because I don’t have the experience of anything else – are seriously flawed. I certainly don’t remember very much of what I studied in school, and I was a pretty good student all through. What is the point of this education then? It doesn’t teach confidence or encourage innovation or talent. It creates factory-moulded robots – and when you hear about the saffronisation of education, that is even scarier. George Orwell’s ‘1984’, anyone? Today the stress placed on students during exams leads them to take their lives, and nowadays parents are turning to that as a solution to their wards’ problems as well. Arjun Singh’s HRD Ministry convened a meeting with representatives from the IIM’s, IIT’s, NGO’s and other institutes last week in New Delhi to debate the issue. Lots of solutions are being bandied about – from doing away with exams till Class 8, to introducing a grading system. Whether mere discussions will translate into effective action remains to be seen, but till then ‘Ten thousand saw I at a glance’ could be written by Mark Twain for all anyone cared. And years down the lane, another person like me will feel forcefully angry and hopelessly sad at the same time, for growing years having gone un-nurtured.

Life

The myriad colours of reflected light bouncing off a shining diamond.