Belief and behaviour

Belief and behaviour are conjoined twins separated at birth, mostly at loggerheads subsequently.

Celebrate the mundane

Celebrate the ever-present 'mundane', for that is what qualifies the sporadic 'remarkable' and holds the fort while awaiting a recurrence.

Happily Sad

Saddled with the sorrow of compromise I surge ahead in happiness.

Juries 02

The greatest dilemma in juries, both sides of the fence: hear oneself or make one heard.

Juries

Juries are where you go judgemental; where the judged think you are mental.

A course is not an education

A course is not an education; it provides a structure and the learner provides self the education.

Romance

Romance about a person, place or thing is essentially a fanciful idea, to keep our faith alive, when none such is nearabouts.

All news is an inspired lie

Media outlets, even the 'different' ones, will ultimately only relay the words of the powers that be. In that sense all 'news' is an inspired lie. Whether strident or shy.

Happiness

Happiness is a factor of its opposite; when the latter prevails, the former sets sail, towards.

The Great Leader

Its scary how many (seemingly) intelligent people are buying into the cult of the Great Leader. Never trust a ruler implicitly; the consequences will soon enough be explicit and expensive.

True Lies

The truth is nothing but an ambivalent lie held close to one's heart. All lies therefore have the possibility of becoming the truth.

Knowledge is free, and expensive

Knowledge is free, but very expensive - for knowing is never being able to forget, now that one knows.

Hyper National Games

The hyper-national chest-beatings of the well-beaten.

Pakistani films off Indian screens

Forcing Pakistani films off the Indian screens, through overt and covert means, can only suggest that we are afraid - of their superior aesthetic, political and cultural impact - of their truth.

Film Festival

A film festival is a song sung anonymously for a crowd not interested in the fine print.

Price for peace

There is no price high for peace; efforts at conflict are dime a dozen.

The worst sort of people

The worst sort of people are those who forget who they were; the present is an offspring of the past - no matter who you currently are and what you presently do, you cannot disown your parentage.

Unfairness

Knowing one has been unfair is much worse than the unfairness itself. Life frequents such knowledge, despite oneself.

TV serials

The more TV serials one watches, the more one is sure there is God - punishing one.

Most interactive story ever told

Life is the most interactive story ever told; its twists and turns all leading to a pre-determined end, from a pre-determined beginning.

Sense and sensibility

After a point nothing makes sense; sensibility takes over.

Sight and sense

Sight is inversely proportional to sense. Not all that we see, is meant that way to be.

Reinventing Life

If it were possible to reinvent life, one would likely invent it similarly; much of what we do is because of who we are, same to same. Breaking away is attractive; so is coming back to.

Sacrifice of animals

Ritual sacrifice of animals is a coward's way of asserting the opposite.

Teachers

The best of teachers know they do not know, enough. Certainty is the bane of learning; learning is what teachers and students do - both of them.

College

A college (like life itself) is a gently flowing river - the water slowly flows past, illuminating the river, but flows past it does, for sure.

Neighbours

We hate our neighbours; they in turn feel the same. An uncertain neighbourhood adds to the lack of certainty inside, making us hate our neighbours, who in turn hate us even more.

Actions

Actions don't necessarily follow intentions or injunctions, but are intrinsically provoked by them.

Social change and Cinema

Cinema is a tool, not necessarily the best one, for social change - but only a tool nonetheless.

Cinema is

Cinema is a linear, finite, 2-D representation of a circular timelessness experienced in a three-dimensional void.

A nation

A nation is sometimes a contextual calamity fell upon a people due to geo-political stratagems beyond their control or care.

Cinematic Truth

The truth in a film is constructed using bits and pieces of inspired lies.

Remembering, and Forgetting...

Remembering, and Forgetting, are both necessary; the former reinforces, the latter liberates...

Storytelling is

Storytelling is a purposefully reordered reimagination of life, with a view to understand its context, content and claims.

Intelligence and Stupidity

Much of the intelligent is actually stupid; many of the stupid not so.

Cinema is

Cinema is the interaction between characters, spaces, times and things and the beliefs these in turn spawn or spurn.

Ragging

Ragging proves that being trained and claimed for sensitivity does nothing to your basic instincts; you remain human, despite an education.

Judgements

Judgements are subjective, subjects are judgemental.

Stories 02

Even boredom has to be engaging in a story.

Stories

Stories are where we find reaffirmation of our beliefs; they are also where we sometimes find beliefs themselves.

Life around us, before us, beyond us ...

Life around us, before us, beyond us - should necessarily surround a writer; for he/she surrenders, in order to win over for us what's around, beyond or before.

Life remembered is life experienced

Life remembered is life experienced; its in the memory of it that the moment exists.

Relationships

Relationships rarely give you what you had originally sought; instead there are surprises, sometimes pleasant.

What Women want

What Women want: Provider, Stud and a Fan. What Women get: Real Men.

What Men want

What Men want: Goddess, Nurse and a Whore. What Men get: Real Women.

Beyond bullets and ballots.

Kashmir is not a security question; its a political one. Beyond bullets and ballots.

The idea of a 'Nation'

'Nation' is a contested idea, subject to the vicissitudes of time past, present or future. What seems untenable today may not be so some time later. The idea of India itself is an example to that effect.

Film appreciation

Film appreciation is less about films and more about appreciation.

Religion

Religion is opium of the masses; the classes are high anyways.

Marriage is a bond

Marriage is a bond; not the james one, stupid !

Romance

Romance is a state of the mind, a destructive mind.

Experience

Experience is experienced in retrospect, when it is no longer possible to influence it.

Company

To seek company is to weigh down the need; to give company is to provide it wings.

Film, photograph, record, write ...

Film, photograph, record, write, draw, paint - don't experience.

Familiarity and Distance

Familiarity breeds a disproportionate distance. Duration (or, rather, lack of) makes distance unusually familiar.

A Medieval Religion ?

Are some religions more medieval than others; or are some medievals more religious than others ?

Male of the species

I have tremendous affection for the male of the species; he is so fucked up.

Skin, bone, muscles and organs

Are we the skin, bone, muscles and organs which make us; or are we the consciousness of our being skin, bone, muscles and organs. In which case how can a stark portrayal of the former lead us to the withdrawing sensibilities of the latter ?

The implied and the Implicit

The implied or the implicit is any day more effective than the stark or the straightforward.

In the Nude

The Nude is best imagined fully clothed; naked human bodies in cinema or otherwise are subject to the phenomenon of quickly diminishing returns.

Making a film

One takes a lot of shit in order to make a film, even a shitty film.

The web of life

The web of life - reasons, role plays, ravings - enriches, as well as entangles.

A completely sensible nonsense

A completely sensible nonsense is to to be able to articulate silence.

Pain in the Pause

Collecting money for a cause is a pain in the ... pause.

Film Festivals

Film festivals are like life - lots of hits, mostly misses.

Of budgets and want ...

Budgets don't necessarily make better cinema; want may.

Gendered

Gender and gender relations debate forgets the half-truths and incomplete lies we men were brought up on, about love, life and longing.

If you laugh at the jokes you crack

If you laugh at the jokes you crack, there is hope.

Age

Age is directly proportional to time spent - ageing.

Trends & Traditions

When traditions reinvent, they become trends.

Moving Image

Cinema + Design + Technology = Moving Image

Time

Time is what you catch up with, and throw down & away. Time is, without being.

Being a Teacher

The toughest part of being a teacher is letting go, and holding on - same as being a parent, a friend, a lover.

Intellectual brahmins

Intellectual brahmins are equally obnoxious in their exclusivist agendas, even though their labours are couched in studied sneering humility.

Subjective subjects

Never fall in love with your subject - be subjective.

Evoke, provoke, reflect, revoke

The moving image is an inadequate carrier of information; the static does the job better. Moving image can only evoke, provoke, reflect, revoke.

Talking heads

Talking heads are fun, if they talk uncertain, unhinged or unripe.

Wholesome bits of untruth, in order ...

A rich experience does not translate easily to a film; it has to be reconstituted through a necessarily contradictory process of assembling wholesome bits of untruth, in order.

Documentary and Documentation

Documentary and Documentation are twins, separated at birth, for good reason.

Discussing education

Discussing education is fun, free as it is of any contact with the real or the receiver.

Hong Kong

Hong Kong - a city caught in the dense web of its own unipolar vertical growth - a micro-packaged consumption paradise blissfully unaware of the wasteful environmental hell it is leaving behind; a card-swapping, self-consciously 'modern' swish metropolis celebrating the primitive selfish ideals of an individual centric growth. A city lost between its instinctively chaotic Chinese soul and a pseudo-Western ordered jugalbandi of contrasting façades, each truthful yet patently false.

Neighbours, not friends

India and China, neighbours not friends, prisoners to colonial era vintage resentments and stereotypes, willing victims of white-skin worship and contemporary geo-political strategic games of one-upmanship...

Briefing

Briefing: a session to under wear one's assets.

Cricket

Cricket provides South Asians a fast track somnambulant nirvana; one in which no effort need be made and no tears need be shed, for wide awake worries.

Battling Belief, in Pakistan

Bombs for innocent children & adults holidaying in a public park, bouquets & battle cries for a bodyguard who duplicitously killed the one he protected and blows from fellow travellers for a one time pop star turned passionate evangelist - Pakistan is a nation battling belief. How can some (or should one say 'many') followers of such a large and widely influential religion be so wary of enquiry, exploration or even disbelief ? Are the Prophets so weak ?

Power of the Bet

Made to order nail biting flourishes and finishes in 20-20 cricket makes you believe in the power of the bet.

Design is not a science

Design is not a science; its a social science, with the associated ambiguity.

Form follows function

Form follows function; the one to celebrate its victory over meaning & substance.

Of belief, and Coma

Radical Islam is as spurious and toxic as radical Hinduism. Any belief system which is unnervingly certain can only lead to a comatose uncertainty - forever at war with itself.

Cinema is a lie

Conflicts on the set can only be subservient to the conflicts on screen - a sensitive film may not have been made in a sensitive manner - cinema is a lie, told truthfully.

Kanahiya, JNU waale

I wish I had Kanahiya's sense of faith and belief, his disarming child like trust in change. Go far dear one. And may God look after you, even though that's one institution you do not believe.

The problem with Design

The problem with design is that it so often misses the woods for the trees; substance for detail; the soul for the façade.

Taxing Times

Tax on life-time Provident Fund savings of a salaried person, who cannot hide his/her real income like a businessman, is a cruel move, sure to encourage dishonest roads not yet taken.

Pride and Prejudice

The spurious National/Anti-National debate is spawning an acute nation-wide discomfort in dealing with our own prejudices, lest we expose ourselves to self-criticism or worse reform.

Kashmir

If Kashmir is such a sensitive word for rest of India, imagine how much more would it be for the residents of Kashmir itself.

Victims & Perpetrators

Recent changes in law have criminalized a range of layered sexual behaviour between men and women, which earlier would have fallen in the realm of the 'grey'. Now we have clear 'victims' and 'perpetrators' - a fairy perfect world of black and white - not incomplete or fragmented human beings bumbling through desire or despair.

'Patriot' missiles

'Patriot' missiles have quite a reputation when it comes to killing innocents and protecting wrongdoers. Just saying.

I Accuse

Unilateral TV studio trials and shrill social media lynchings are dangerous in principle. Truth is the first casualty in this motivated din. Those gloating over RK Pachauri and Tarun Tejpal will do well to remember that mere accusation is not guilt; and everything has a context, where the complainant may be implicated as well, in desire or deed.

Sugar daddies

Sugar daddies don't come without strings attached, my dears (Tehelka, TERI, etc).

Shifting home

Shifting home can be done in a day, or in a lifetime.

Teachers

Convocation time at NID - time to celebrate studenthood and its passing. I wonder where do teachers fit in ? When do we celebrate their staying put ?

FTII

The FTII tangle has two acute angles and one obdurate.