The Dirty Picture

She is unapologetic, unabashed through and through and she does things as she wishes to and just laces it with clever one or two liners and you chuckle, giggle and Silk moves on with her next move. She rips apart all the layers of systematic Indian hypocrisy and quite mercilessly so. And why not, she has learned her lessons very early of this hypocrisy and its vacuousness that Indians proudly swear by. She has learned watching through that key hole that a man can manage to move on from one woman to another quickly and duplicity comes to him naturally. She knows, if she followed the same behavior, she will be labeled loose, lewd and lustful. Guess what, she doesn't care or at least that is what she projects.

The Indian system which puts such a premium on a girl to be 'morally good' one who cares for her modesty and fall in the system's expectation, one of marriage followed by babies or else she falls short of some God forsaken womanhood. And, so even in her rebellious avatar, Silk, ends her life in bridal clothes. One she desired or society desired of her is hard to say.

Movie is pacy, replete with clever one liners and it does not dwell on nuances for too long and there isn't anything to whine about. Nothing at all. A montage, accolades worthy.

On a lighter note, will ooh la la be as perky or "bombatt" without Bappi Lahiri's voice? Think about it.

On Steven Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature

... despite the fact that there is such a thing as human nature, despite the fact that we have plenty of ugly, violent impulses inside us, it is perfectly possible to set up a world in which those impulses don’t actually emerge as violent behavior. This is because human nature is a complex system, it has many parts, and among them are a faculty of empathy, a faculty of reason, a faculty of self-control.

…change is now infecting the cultures of societies eager to mimic the societies they consider more wealthy, powerful and successful, possessing the ‘normal’ pathologies that go with success, including high levels of everyday violence. The rise in violence in a number of Indian cities has in recent years been spectacular. The South Asian euphoria over the nuclear tests, however short-lived and however limited in geographical spread, can also be read as an example of the same story of brutalisation and necrophilia. It reflects not merely deep feelings of inferiority, masculinity-striving and parity-seeking, but also a certain nihilism and vague, almost free-floating genocidal rage.

Excerpts from an interview on Better Angels of Our Nature and Why Violence Has Declined

The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything by Ken Robinson

Its difficult to have missed Sir Ken Robinson's talk which is available on TED and perhaps one of the most devoured talk of our time. His wry sense of humor, nailing the ailments of current education system, all laced with his profound understanding on the topic which he talks with ease. One of the recent watch made me impulsively buy his book, The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything.

His book is a fine extension of things he talks about: creativity, education, its manifestation in a system, a system that perhaps has gone wrong in a severe way. And is looking for ways to change, louder than ever: change that he professes, transformation in a revolutionary way rather than just revising a system. And he does it with pure examples of many creative people who rejected the system, found themselves misfit in a system and kept looking for their creative passion till they discovered it. He urges to look away from the current industrialized model of education and find ways which leverages human diversity in a rich way to save ourselves from an impending crisis of severely damaged human ecology.

He emphasizes that culture itself is strict system, a manifestation, a structure to organize ourselves in an earnest attempt to define our identities.

Culture is a system of permissions.

First we create a system of culture, we put certain parameters of behavior, acceptable & non- acceptable ones. And in doing so, we start putting expectations and sub-consciously demand things and indirectly command people to behave in certain ways in a restrictive way. But things do not always behave in a pre-determined or a predictable manner. Life is not linear, in fact it is extremely organic. To deal with unpredictability and non-linearity, we need to be flexible enough to explore alternate creative paths. And thus he rejects uniformity and homogeneity of a systematic pre-approved thinking.

We put such a premium on being approved of, we become reluctant to take risks.

Book is a celebration of his revolutionary thinking which he has formed over a period of time after interacting with several diverse people across the globe, their journey (sometimes a difficult one) to find their passion and being in one's element, their only element which places them in this magical space in mind where they cannot imagine doing anything else. It breaks all the shackles of a system and frees people to follow that inner inkling of heart whatever that talent might be. For example, so many cultures still emphasize and define a women's secondary role in the system, her delusional image of nurturing the humanity, motherhood and a gender which should bring glamor and gloss to the settings. He says,

Women still have an uneasy relationship with power and the traits necessary to be a leader. There is this internalized fear that if we are really powerful, we are going to be considered ruthless or pushy or strident- all those epithets that strike right at our femininity. We are still working at trying to overcome the fear that power and womanliness are mutually exclusive.

Atul Gawande's Coaching a Surgeon: What Makes Top Performer Better?

Every time you read essays written by Atul Gawande you are on a high, high achieved through his honest and extremely sorted thought process. He brings his perspective as a physician/surgeon but he correlates his learning and understanding quite easily to other professions and disciplines. His latest essay had the same impact, same heady impact. This is not the first time, I have longed to read his books. Below is an excerpt from his aforementioned article:

We care about results in sports, and if we care half as much about results in schools and in hospitals we may reach the same conclusion. Local health systems may need to go the way of the Albemarle school district. We could create coaching programs not only for surgeons but for other doctors, too—internists aiming to sharpen their diagnostic skills, cardiologists aiming to improve their heart-attack outcomes, and all of us who have to figure out ways to use our resources more efficiently. In the past year, I’ve thought nothing of asking my hospital to spend some hundred thousand dollars to upgrade the surgical equipment I use, in the vague hope of giving me finer precision and reducing complications. Avoiding just one major complication saves, on average, fourteen thousand dollars in medical costs—not to mention harm to a human being. So it seems worth it. But the three or four hours I’ve spent with Osteen each month have almost certainly added more to my capabilities than any of this.

Talk about medical progress, and people think about technology. We await every new cancer drug as if it will be our salvation. We dream of personalized genomics, vaccines against heart disease, and the unfathomed efficiencies from information technology. I would never deny the potential value of such breakthroughs. My teen-age son was spared high-risk aortic surgery a couple of years ago by a brief stent procedure that didn’t exist when he was born. But the capabilities of doctors matter every bit as much as the technology. This is true of all professions. What ultimately makes the difference is how well people use technology. We have devoted disastrously little attention to fostering those abilities.

Complaints

I figure, complaining, is a form of luxury. A privilege, if one wants to label it. Perhaps from our impatience, restlessness and a need to be heard. What if, you did not have access to vent, access to complain, to simply offload and step aside? What would you do?

You turn inwards perhaps, reason in all possible ways and reach within for a solution. Perhaps, complaining is an outwardly, somewhat noisy expression, as I see it.

Turning inwards, in absence of such luxurious mechanism of venting, you struggle more honestly, gain focus with the energy conserved, focus that is geared towards something more.

Think Different

To Steve Jobs and his Apple Inc., salüt!

José Saramago's All the Names

...In order to reach it, it might still be necessary to fight the dragon. This one does not have furious, drooling jaws, it does not snort smoke and fire through its nostrils, it does not roar loud as any earthquake, it is simply a waiting, stagnant darkness, thick and silent as the ocean deeps...

Senhor José, the protagonist of All the Names, thinks to himself, a thought flickering on his mind over outcomes of his dark deed, an inexplicable obsession about a woman, who is an absolute stranger to him. Can't say that it's a great book but I could not put it in bad reads altogether, either. There were some portions which I felt were little more than ordinary. May be I need to read some more of his work to appreciate better. Perhaps, all is not lost when you are left with neutrality. Although, there is a quote in the book that made a lot of sense:

After all, we were not born on this earth, only to connect with God.

Delhi Belly

Next few paragraphs are strictly about Delhi Belly/ Aamir Khan and why it was such a below ordinary effort from otherwise acclaimed minds in Bollywood. If you have really enjoyed the movie, you may not like to read what I have to say. Just close the browser tab and leave.

The movie is replete with fart and number 2 jokes. I get it, but how many times, not the entire 80 minutes. Darn it. Move on man, what else you have got? Nothing really. Weak story line, loose plot, childish screenplay, desperate attempts to make audience laugh. Ceiling collapsing, diamond packet mix-up with stool sample. I get it, the attempt was to fill the scenes with fart noises, display of filthiest toilets. Clever? No. Far from it. A little too desperate to your face but failed attempt in so many ways at so many levels. Unless audience is assumed as a bunch of college kids only who 'loved' 3-Idiots just so much and wanted to take that experience one step ahead. Sure, it would have worked. But it didn't for me. It might be working for a specific target section. And that would be the obvious guess from this effort.

It has become clear to me, once the names are popular like Aamir Khan, anything he packages with his brand name it becomes a hit, irrespective of substance. Yes, comedy movie can be classy too and that is where Delhi Belly failed (so had 3-Idiots) on an epic scale. It is strange that he is the same guy who gave us Taare Zameen Par or Peepli Live for that matter. But again, brains behind both these movies were different than Aamir Khan, he just happened to get all the limelight. He does it with such finesse that people are drowned in his aura of front facing that it makes it appear that it's all his effort. And he is the only man who is lugging the talent van in Bollywood.

Anything You Want

Anything You Want. A book by Derek Sivers. His first book. It's out there for sale, now, since yesterday, and its already down with 45% discount. Derek's post on Loss is something I have gone back and read multiple times. It's something I have treasured as an online discovery. Very dearly and closely.

Seth Godin on book's brilliance, here.

PS: Derek has also added my name along with others under acknowledgment for providing feedback/critique on the unpublished version of the book. So if you are one of my friends then you might want to jump and buy the book to see my name in there...:).

You don't say

We are such inward secret creatures, that inwardness the most amazing thing about us, even more amazing than our reason. But we cannot just walk into the cavern and look around. Most of what we think we know about our minds is pseudo-knowledge. We are all such shocking poseurs, so good at inflating the importance of what we think we value.

There's something fishy about describing people's feelings. You try hard to be accurate, but as soon as you start to define such and such a feeling, language lets you down. When we really speak the truth, words are insufficient. But they're important to us, nonetheless, because they are what connects us to thoughts other than those belonging to us.
~Iris Murdoch

Yet we talk, to overcome silences. Fear silences, for the discomfiture it brings us. We find quietude eerie and try and fill it up with words.

Comfortable Activism

True activism must not be an easy path. Asking uncomfortable questions to the point of extreme discomfort and working with people whose rights have been compromised, infringed and trampled upon appears to be lot more difficult than this new wave of online activism and this rising clique of bored professionals who indulge in concern almost to a point you may just as well cringe as if its their make belief profession bequeathed by 24/7 internet availability and its million flowery offerings in organizing someone's suffering and its existence into their own forced importance. As someone said,

We agreed: it seems improbable that after years, decades, of politics, action, research, we can still be so easily shocked. You know it’s not uncommon to hear activists, while discussing quotidian barbarities - the system’s incredible & everyday sadisms - confessing, almost sheepish, ‘I was actually shocked.’ Embarrassed at the naivety that we’re still stunned...(contd under Thesis on strange surprise )

Himanshu Kumar of VCA shares his experience on this virtual albeit fake activism. You discern.

...

People who are in love and people who are in love with the idea of love are remarkably different.
No?

Songs of Sapphique

"I have walked a stair of swords,
I have worn a coat of scars.
I have vowed with hollow words,
I have lied my way to the stars."

From someone who also said,

"Walls have ears.
Doors have eyes.
Trees have voices.
Beasts tell lies.
Beware the rain.
Beware the snow.
Beware the man
You think you know."

Snow

"How much can we ever know about the love and pain in another heart? How much can we hope to understand those who have suffered deeper anguish, greater deprivation and more crushing disappointments than we ourselves have known?"

*
"There are two kind of men, said Ka, in a didactic voice. The first kind does not fall in love until he's seen how the girl eats a sandwich, how she combs her hair, what sort of nonsense she cares about, why she's angry at her father, and what sort of stories people tell about her. The second type of man -- and I am in this category -- can fall in love with a woman only if he knows next to nothing about her."

**
Both these quotes are from Snow of Pamuk which I haven't read. But quotes were worth scribbling down in that little gray notebook.

Statistics

Confidence in self is faith/ trust in others. Both intangible, strangely unquantifiable.

No numbers attached to its strength just members of ordinal scale: good, medium, bad. Making room for mind games.

And remain fragile and crushable, for values, justice, fairness remain malleable and not absolutes.

[Just] speaking statistically.

Greed

If you think you have overcome greed of human kind, then in all likelihood, you haven't dealt with the complying submissive weighing scale.
S-i-g-h!

Dhobi Ghat (Mumbai Diaries)

Dhobi Ghat encapsulates lives of four individuals, four strikingly different individuals, from four different backgrounds and classes, belonging to four different stages of lives, who manage to merge their hues and intertwine incidences of lives by being in a complex relationship with one complex city, Mumbai Bombay. A city of hope and aspiration but also despondency and dejection.

Kiran Rao's ensemble of background and its presentation is dexterous and full of poetic details. Merging of foreground and background and many treatments of b/w cityscapes, moldy buildings, its worn-out people, complex choices, bumpy lives, personal and private moves is intelligent. Yet, somehow when the characters takeover and she begins her storytelling, something goes, may be not awry but perhaps missing the zing or brilliance that could have been. Whole movie experience gives you disparate moments to relish and you linger on to certain details and cleverness behind for a little bit longer. But overall you feel disconnected and detached or always trying too hard to anchor into most characters turmoil except for Yasmin (Kriti Malhotra), an enthusiastic chirpy Muslim girl originally from UP now married to a man in Mumbai. Her trailing enthusiasm towards love, married life and small excitements of life brings her to a drastic finality. And you wonder how quietly a city engulfs a life even if its the end. And Arun (played by Aamir Khan), a recluse and a pensive painter while he gets his mannerisms of a painter quite well. He looks away if the conversation is not of his interest. He gazes at city deeply. He looks at objects for details, touches and feels them with fingers for texture to know more. He is finicky enough to use the same mug for his coffee every-time at home. Yet, when he opens his mouth, you beg God to stop him, whatever it may take to do that and you are willing to pay for it. His speaking mannerisms are abrupt and perhaps make it worse since he delivers his words in English. Awkward. Something horrifically amusing and reminds me of another disastrous effort by Hrithik Roshan in Kites. It was to, omg, stop! effect. But then that movie itself was a disaster in totality. This perhaps can be attributed to years of training them as Bollywood mold of larger than life 'superstars', where characters don't play them, they play the characters.

To conclude, Dhobi Ghat gives you several special moments to cherish, things to smile about despite its multitude cliches on Mumbai rains or romanticizing its underbelly. Its pleasurable to watch Munna (charmingly played by Prateik Babbar), and voyeuristic pleasures provided through Shai. She tells us through her character that no matter how uber cool and detached we pretend to be in public but we all still harbor this private intrusive life even if it means just speaking mild lies or intrude privately but obsessively, delving into gray areas about someone if that someone is of interest. Dhobi Ghat is about savoring these divergent vignettes, merging of characters and their habitats but regretfully its not that comes out as one cohesive experience.

Laughter(stock)

Perhaps, when fleeting laughter quietens,
enduring smiles make their way.

....

It was to this personal India, and not the India of independence and its great names, that I went when the time came. I was full of nerves. But nothing had prepared me for the dereliction I saw. No other country I knew had so many layers of wretchedness, and few countries were as populous. I felt I was in a continent where, separate from the rest of the world, a mysterious calamity had occurred. Yet what was so overwhelming to me, so much in the foreground, was not to be found in the modern-day writing I knew, Indian or English. In one Kipling story an Indian famine was a background to an English romance; but generally in both English and Indian writing the extraordinary distress of India, when acknowledged, was like something given, eternal, something to be read only as background. And there were, as always, those who thought they could find a special spiritual quality in the special Indian distress.

Above is Naipaul in The Writer and India.

If there is a silence, a dullness, a strange sense of calm, it is because the streets are full of people who have made peace with misery and helplessness; the state has banned all other possibilities, and done so with some violence.

And this is Pamuk for Kars in Turkey, while writing Snow and I found a remarkable similarity in the sentiments of both the authors.

Madame Bovary: Gustave Flaubert

Before the wedding, she had believed herself in love. But not having obtained the happiness that should have resulted from that love, she now fancied that she must have been mistaken. And Emma wondered exactly what was meant in life by words 'bliss', 'passion', 'ecstasy', which had looked so beautiful in books.

From Flaubert's novel: Madame Bovary.

Ambar Se: Raghu Dixit

Happy to discover Raghu Dixit's music. May be he is already really popular, and I had not heard of him before. He is brilliant. Liked Ambar se and No man will so far. Happy to share here.

Raghu Dixit - 04 -...

Coetzee's Disgrace

Harder, yet easier too. One gets used to things getting harder; one ceases to be surprised that what used to be as hard as hard can be grows harder yet.

David Lurie in Disgrace, a middle-aged South African professor in Cape Town reflects after multiple disappointments in his own life and circumstantial failures brought upon him by himself. He is resigned towards his life and makes no attempt to resurrect what he loses with a casual affair with a much younger student. He is reckless, we get to know as we are told about his disinterest in his job, towards his personal life and missing passions. He has intellectualized all the events in his life so far. He has been dismissed from his teaching job at the university as a consequence. After which he tries to move away from things, city life, its intricacies and takes refuge at his young daughter's farm. Lucy Lurie. Lucy has chosen a country life. As David reflects his move to his daughter's house,

But he is a father, that is his fate and as a father grows older, he turns more and more- it cannot be helped- towards his daughter. She becomes his second salvation, the bride of his youth reborn.

All is going just like country life, until that day, the event which shakes his calm and gives rise to only, commotion of feelings, of a protective father. His daughter gets assaulted and plundered physically. After which he is not the same and probably never will be. His quiet reflections are always towards the incidence or some aspect of it.

Menstruation, childbirth, violation and its aftermath: blood matters; a woman's burden, woman's preserve.

Not for the first time, he wonders whether women would not be happier living in communities of women, accepting visits from men only when they choose.

And since Lucy decides to choose silence over the event of her violation, he thinks,

They will read that they are being sought for robbery and assault and nothing else. It will dawn on that over the body of the woman silence is being drawn like a blanket.

The book is a quick one, stunning in certain portions, a page-turner with a certain distinct quality of narrative darkness. My gripe with the book: Coetzee skipping more detailing of certain characters, like Melanie Isaac the girl he has an affair with, never makes an appearance in his life and sort of strangely disappears abruptly. And then Petrus, farm neighbor to Lucy. It is subtly hinted that he is a complex character in all its simplicity and might have something to do with the incidence but rarely gets more attention.