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Sunday 28 December 2008

Am I a loner

I think I am a loner
and so does my mother and girlfriend
and so do my friends
But I don't...

I hate people barging inside my house and sitting there until there midnight with no agenda whatsoever and believe me... I have lots of them. I hate people coming and asking me where I bought my curtains, my cupboard, my table, whether I should have taken an lcd tv or a plasma instead of crt. I am so bored with the same discussion over and over again. It's almost like people just look around you and want to talk about things around you and those things are generally very general in nature. The niche lot of friends know you, they talk about interests, share information, generally laugh out things and at the very least are not repetitive. Some of these mind nuggets I've had recently have forced me to re-think who I am again...well... yet again.. Its quite irritating to become comfortable with yourself and then read something or come across some statement which makes you shake up and take notice, go way out in the universe and look at measly insignificant existence from afar. All this makes one feel like shit. I dont want to feel this, I want to have a selfish megalomanic existence driven only by feeling ultra confident and ultra good about myself. I really admire people who are so sure of who they are.

The above lines have been written over a period of 6 months... quite something for just 10 lines. I think I have to stop reading nonsense, people who preach 'becoming zero', 'being evolved', 'enlightenment'.. Like last week, just when I was returning to normalcy, I came across this,

'...Realization is explosive. It takes place spontaneously, or at the slightest hint. The quick is not better than the slow. Slow ripening and rapid flowering alternate. Both are natural and right. Yet, all this is so in the mind only. As I see it, there is really nothing of the kind. In the great mirror of consciousness images arise and disappear and only memory gives them continuity. And memory is material -- destructible, perishable, transient. On such flimsy foundations we build a sense of personal existence -- vague, intermittent, dreamlike. This vague persuasion: 'I-am-so-and-so' obscures the changeless state of pure awareness and makes us believe that we are born to suffer and to die... '

And it fucked my head..no matter how complicated these guys can make things, and it still is fucking it up... and I don't want to go back in the universe to look at my ugly self.. Someone please keep me grounded. Will being a loner help??? I think I am.. like, really..

Tuesday 23 December 2008

Mood and Moody, Sitting on a wall, W-H-I-N-I-N-G

Mood and moody, sitting on a wall. W-H-I-N-I-N-G. No matter what anyone says or thinks 'Mood' runs the world especially India since many foreigners claim to very irate at the association of mood with everything here. I've never been to their country or lived in their culture, so I wouldn't be the best person to judge but I have a sneaky feeling that they are also essentially the same people. Whiny complaining cynical pessimists who are suckers for love and always do anything only when they feel like it. So mood runs the world. Hence proved. I wish it were as easy as this for proving anything. This formula never really worked in my mathematic exams in school. Just take the teachers round and round the same equation and write a bold and confident 'Hence Proved' at the bottom. Sometimes even the teacher would get confused at my audacity.

Anyway (and I apologize for getting to the point after one paragraph), what I meant to get at, as the title of this post suggests was the story of Mood and Moody. I thought of it in the context of films and the people. Films always reflect the popular mood of the country and sometimes the world and vice versa. Filmmakers want to make films picking up references around them, at least, the ones I like. They are the so called 'with the times, realistic' film makers. Of course, living in an industry which has thrived on magical reality through decades, one cannot call anything realistic. The Indian audience is always on the lookout for the unexpected twist, the superhero, the weak guy transforming to kill the villain. So realistic cinema also has certain unrealistic things about it, but it is nevertheless realistic. And there is the brand of filmmakers who don't care what the mood, where the country is going, what the world is doing, they just go to the friendly neighborhood DVD library and pick up a film with their eyes closed from the top most shelf and wish no one would have seen it. A year later, one can get to see the same film again in the theatre, this time with some 'Indian' elements added, sex scenes deleted, songs added and emotions simplified. You see, Indian filmmakers look at the lowest common denominator of people with the lowest IQ and see them as their audience. It doesn't matter whether they have never seen a film before in their life, but 'if you leave them out, then you leave the real India out' as they put it and then get on to dumbing everything down. Of course, India can never let go and should not let go of the magic of their kind of cinema. It is entertaining, its dramatic, its lovable, its exciting, exhilarating at times and full of life. And when I say that, I talk about the good films, films which are unanimously entertaining and thought/feeling provoking. Churning out 1000 films a year, the industry cannot really be expected to have  a quality standard. 

So the moody audience, always in some trip or the other, not to forget their lazy nature, makes up for the confused mood of the audience. So, in reality one can never judge what to make. Some keep recycling old formula's, some have new ones but don't get the budgets, some invent new and newer marketing strategies but no one has ever mastered the formula for getting it right. This automatically negates all arguments for those who function like cake shops who only bake what the customer wants. If only making films was like running a cake shop. One can say after this confused discussion that a film maker should only make what he feels, but do film makers feel anything. Half of them, including myself many times, live on second hand emotions. You see a film, some emotion gets aroused, you read a book, another emotion crops up. And before I get into an argument with myself over the eternal question of what is original and what is not, I must say that true emotion for me comes in those milliseconds of feeling within and you know you have felt it and the intensity of that can drive you for a long time and longing for more.

I would personally like to throw mood and moody out of the window, try to feel the breeze and see where life takes me.