THE PILGRIMAGE OF THE ATHEIST

Two thousand three hundred years after Chandragupta maurya had come to live out the last days of his life on an insignificant hillock, (lost) in the vast expanse of his empire – the very first of the subcontinent- I was reading from the information board of the archaeological society of india beneath it.. Chandra gupta maurya had since then passed into history and the face of the earth itself had undergone a change that nothing that happens now can  turn the wheel backwards, but I doubt if that change had touched shravan belgola  at all.It is still a sleepy town insignificant  in the larger scheme of things for the ‘growing’ nation of india except for a slot in the tourist itinerary of the domestic pilgrims and foreign students; there were a few bakeries and two hotels and small shops that sold handicrafts one would find anywhere in india. It is an irony that there is a wiki pedia page on shravana belgola though one has to search hard to find a browsing centre. but that is another story.

                                                                                           As I looked up to see the nuns walk up the hillock of chandragiri , I realized that between two millennia , the only thing that symbolized any change in their lives was, perhaps, the handle that holds  together the peacock feathers  which  they use,  to sweep the earth clean of small organisms they might  inadvertently trample..that handle is now  made of plastic..

                                    They were clad in white and wore the cloth as a shroud over their heads as they moved like little white caterpillars up the small steps to the temple complex.  One of them had chosen not to use the steps and hence crawled over the curvy hillside.

                                                                                                                                  Then as I too made my way , I tried to understand what it means to actually ‘relinquish’ an empire – not an inherited one, but one established after a lifetime of struggle subjugating  a wide range of people- from the culturally, aesthetically refined Greeks in the northwest to the warlike nomadic tribes of the subcontinent. For every interested reader, ashoka’s  repudiation of war  is an eye catcher; but to me, chandragupta’s renunciation has always implied a much more deeper desire for truth. What makes a man who was an emperor one day , a naked monk the very next day. As I kept thinking, groups of rocks welcomed me, like their ancestors that welcomed Chandragupta maurya- rocks that are as old as the Indian subcontinent- professing a way of living equally ancient.

                                                                                                                      In shravana belgola , there are two hills, one is the chandragiri , the other is the one housing the more famous bahubali statue. Chandragiri temple complex had not a single tourist when I went inside (the previous night, 3 buses full of tourists had come to the same place where I was lodged ). however, the market always  belongs to bahubali, the tallest statue made out of a single stone- people flock towards the superlatives, little aware that , nine out of ten times, the small can be extraordinarily beautiful. In the process , that left me at peace with the place.(bless them)

                                                                                                      The temple seemed like a delicately balanced diadem on the locks of a runaway princess’ hair;  the decision not to pave the turbulent rocky surface of the hill (as we usually find in hill side temples)  gave the impression as if the whole complex was a boat swaying over the uncertain waves of an ocean’s middle. The jaina artist, it seems, thought it better not to try and master nature but just coexist with it. Even the statue of bharata , bahubali’s brother , his legs mutilated and standing beneath open skies symbolize this spirit. If one looks closer , the broad chest disappears and one can see only the rock , a fragment of the mountain’s wilderness; but once  you walk further , the limbs and torso of a meditating man- emerges out like a dream. I wondered if  the sculptor wanted man to be like the mountain. Stubborn, but warm; raw but extraordinarily broad hearted.

                                                                                                                                            Cavalry and infantry and knives and swords can capture the people who dwell in the mountains; but the mountains themselves cannot be easily conquered. It means much more than transforming  a thousand human beings into captives. To subdue the mountain, one has to climb it, only at the pace the mountain allows one to. And the man has to climb, not just physically , but psychologically.. he has to outgrow himself to the extent that he is never the same person again. Perhaps that is why monks capture kingdoms that emperors never could.

                                                                                                                                    The shrines housing the tirthankaras are deafeningly silent. Their nude bodies  exude a stark simplicity, of the soul unlike any other. The transformation the Indian mind had to undergo  to learn to revere a human being- “a renouncing monk” above that of the divine and celestial must have been a watershed in religious psychology. Surely, the tirthankaras are not imagined as all powerful. They are certainly not multi cephalic nor are they thousand limbed. Their majesty is the majesty of the man who gives up. Their strength comes from their courage to be vulnerable. They are not the ones who give answers, they are silent to one’s questions and perhaps in that silence one begins to think.

                      Suddenly, the profuse hemorrhage of images  from the hoysaleshvara and chennaksava temples of belur and halabedu faded into an avalanche of silence that the shrines exuded and I was lost into that vortex of meditation. And as I walked down the hill, I felt I understood what the birds were chirping was indeed , the mountain’s song and the song was inseparable from the monks ‘ song.  They had both drunk at the fountains of divine silence.

                            And that song was blooming like a dark flower in the moist recesses of the unknown forests of my heart. 

the artist - the silence of the fall

After the movie, i wanted to stand there forever and clap till my hands would wear out.. the audience walked  out noisily before the credits rolled ..the theatre had a handful of audience some of whom had moved away to darker corners in search of privacy. . the nation’s most famous multiplex theatre had employees who either had the brains of a hare or the heart of a hyena, else there wouldn’t have been a  cut in the movie  at 40 minutes for a desi style snack break ..this is just one of the sacrileges , a movie like ‘artist ‘ has to face to survive the crass ness of the movie market..

George valentin, the protoganist in the movie undergoes nothing less. The artist is  a powerful movie, one of those epics that redeem the tragedy of a ‘fall’ in the everlasting gardens of aesthetic art form..

The movie is about a silent movie superstar whose fall coincides with the rise of talkies – this is personified in the character of peppy miller who is just a sidekick in the silent movie era and who owes her screen appearances to the initial kindness of George valentine, but who goes on to become the Hollywood sweet heart in the talkie era. The rest of the movie describes in subtle imagery , the penury of George valentin’s fall along with the growing admiration and affection of peppy miller towards the former even when he is becoming a shadow of his former self

                                                                                                                                     This is certainly not a new story, but it certainly is not a cliché, as one of my friends has exclaimed. The newness is not in the story, but,  in the vision, in the human touch and in the questions it raises in the mind of the audience .    these questions, we remind ourselves with so much pity, have no definite answers.

                                                                   Have we ever been bored of the moon ? have we ever said, oh, the same crescent? The story of a man’s rise and fall , the magnificence of the contrast of the rags and the riches is too close to a man’s heart to ever become a cliché.

                                                      The movie asks some fundamental questions. What does the artist mean to the society? Is he dispensable even in a capitalist model of world where markets determine what art is to be seen and what should not be seen?

What are the options for the artist in a changing world? His stubbornness is characterised as vanity and pride , it would make a good picture , though..but his willingness to go with the flow is decried as a COMPROMISE..is there any way out?

The movie knows too well that answers are not what make an epic..the movie reminded me of another Indian classic- guru dutt’s kaagaz ke phool and brought to a faltering memory, the likes of Chandra babu, thyagaraja bagavadar, v k ramamsamy , kanchana and many more who made everything and lost everything in cinema..

                                                                                                                                              At one scene, the hero realises that he is living in a world of his own, where the sounds are absorbed into themselves and everything is explained in gestures of ethereal beauty while the world outside wishes even the dogs would talk ..such was the frenzy, talkies must have created in the lives of silent movie stars.. i remembered reading about akira kurasowa’s brother, who was working as a narrator in the silent movies . He committed suicide, when the talkies robbed him of his employment. May be it was more than that. It is the robbing of one’s own existential purpose. What a person, has believed , is his life’s meaning. How can the removal of that be lived with? i still remember with sparkling vividity the tremor in the face of a therukoothu artiste, who while performing  as raavanan, made a short detour to describe the struggle his life had become everyday in a world of decadent values and decaying villages.. it would do well to understand that koothu artists are one of the highly skilled and trained whose mastery goes beyond the confines of any written grammar. This is the significance of the 'artist' in our lives. he entertains us, thinks we will look after him in his failures or bear with his shortcomings, but, we , in the mad race for survival, inevitably ignore the unsuccessful, little knowing that the circles of life might soon bring us to the same point in the circumference....But the pain of an artist's fall is indescribable....Ironically,in one of the scenes,  the artist auctions his own portrait to raise money so as  to escape bankruptcy. The memory of all those nameless portrait artists who lost their livelihood with the entry of still cameras and motion cameras flashes in our mind, barely, bringing a smile that would get lost in our tired sleeps.

                    When the movie started, i had prayed to my stars to give me the strength to sit through a silent movie. I am one of those people who live and die on the seashores of words. But as i walked to the parking lot, i listened to the sounds of footsteps and bike engines with the ears of a newborn and then i realised how superfluous sounds actually are , in human life, even if  only for a second..perhaps, there is no other image that could better explain the impact of a movie like artist..

an innocent massacre

Two days back, a fifteen year old became the murderer of his hindi teacher in Armenian street.  He slashed her throat and stabbed her abdomen , effectively killing her, for writing down reprimanding remarks about his dismal performance in hindi , in his school diary . We all stand shell shocked,t his act of gruesome violence difficult to digest even in a world where such incidents are becoming common place. The Americans have been under fire , literally , from their younger generation that brings guns to the school .

How do we make sense of this incident and what diagnosis we label on it are equally important to determine our own actions in the future .

Some of my friends might put the blame squarely on the turbulent younger generation . i would like to disagree. The younger generation looks up to its elders subconsciously. We are the moral sanctioners of their vices, knowingly or unknowingly.. we provide the wrong cues for their body shots. As wordsworth said, “ child is the father of the man” .. the children right now are revealing the underlying filthiness  and goriness of our society, its values and mores, deeply nauseating to someone who is willingly to sanely and objectively examine it.

Yes , my friends, these are our corpses that have come out in the open. The violence of our children are the violence of  us, fathers and mothers.

Ironically, if we are to understand deeply, sadly, the knives of boys like irman have the inappropriate and unjustified  role  to act as scalpels that perform the debridement of our diabetic society.. We  perhaps, are suffering from a disease of excess. Excess technology,excess communication, excess entertainment, excess consumerism.. but our children cannot grow into an adult at the same velocity our excess external growth mandates and requires them to be. After all, a caterpillar becomes a butterfly only at its own pace. The fifteen year old today,  has in his hands , the gadgets and machines, that require the maturity of thirty year olds to handle . Now they have set about to correct that anamoly by upgrading themselves to crimes fit for thirty year old, albeit with the intention and motives of a school goer.

What does our education system set as  objectives? What are our students being prepared for? These are crucial questions that need to be answered.

Take this specific case. The student was certainly concerned with his parent’s view regarding his poor performance in hindi. The teacher did nothing that other teachers all over this state do not do. She just did what has been a routine practice when it comes to students scoring  low marks in examinations. She only wrote in the school diary about it.

What went wrong? For an adolescent boy bogged down by peer pressures and parental admonishments , this routine act might have looked as a violation of the teacher -student's  unwritten pact of DONT TELL ON ME, teacher....after all , fifteen is an age when children first attempt to stand on their legs, it is the age when the budding adult wants to have a world view of his own; this is the age that suspects the right things and accepts the wrong things without judgement or examination; Surely, this is the age whose mores are only in the transition between naivety and maturity – the teacher who complains to  ‘dad’ is  ‘bad’ and the teacher who is willing to let them off the hook is ‘cool’. As an young boy , i still remember, that  in my school days, the most fearsome feeling was always the moment when my class teacher informed my father about my little serenades of indiscipline.

Obviously, that was the ‘school diary ‘ hating age.The principal deficit in the student teacher interface is that the latter do not either understand or do not want to cross the boundary to understand the peculiar problems of  the fragile innocence of adolescence. They actually assume the airs of a judge though this  is not a wrong thing in itself in the outside world. What most  teachers forget  is that ‘a school is the place where they learn to live before they actually start living. ‘It does not serve well to treat them in the manner of , “ cross the line and you will be thrashed” – in other words, ‘if you judge them , you lose them’. This alienation is only bound to widen when these children are mercilessly prepared for careers in an adulthood they have no idea about.

Come to think of it. While most of the classmates if  Irman might have known of his anger towards his teacher, the poor teacher would have had no clue of this vicious animosity.Perhaps , the deficit lies there.

How can the teacher not know ?

How can one be ignorant of the student’s trespass into the self destructive swamplands of violence while knowing about  his or her poor academic performance . ? which is the pathology?  Look at it like this. Perhaps , if the teacher had known of the student’s feelings towards her, she would have called the parent over the phone instead of communicating therough the diary. If she had done that, perhaps the pathology in need of correction – which is the delicate balance of student teacher relationship – would not have been preposterously substituted by the ‘ superfluous concerns of poor performance in hindi’.

It is sad that education has become a formula and not an attempt at the realisation of one’s own vision of life.

I could write more , about how flawed the entire premise upon which the whole complex operates- but it is only obvious that the fruits of a system that treats schools as profit making enterprises that specialise in the production of high mark scoring candidates fit to be set in motion in to the race for high earning jobs will smack of a ‘poison without an anti dote’

Because , for all the logical distortions of neo liberal capitalism that endorses this mad race of competition, survival of the fittest, etc, LEARNING  can only be cultivated in the tender soils of curiosity and love. Otherwise the harvest we reap from our “educated young minds” will always bear the inevitable obituaries of innocence- irrigated as they are by the bloody red streams of violence-

The knife of Irman has actually been dissecting with a mad man’s blind fury, the fast putrefying flesh of our own children as much as  it  did that of the poor teacher who lies sacrificed at the altar of an obnoxious system

AND THE OSCAR GOES TO...

Many years back, a man called jean paul Sartre refused the nobel prize for literature. He openly refused to be on the side of the west in the endless confrontation between the west and the east. His act effectively put  the nobel prize in its proper place.  Only nine years later in 1973, the nobel committee vindicated sartre’s act by awarding the prize to the greatest peace monger of them all, henry Kissinger. Wow and, what a genius of a man. It was not the first time in the history of mankind . butchers always solve the brutal suffering of the lambs, by killing them. they are  the ultimate purveyors of  human charity.  

  An award has always been a political event . the giving, the accepting or the occasional refusing – all these three acts anoint the event with a politics that we do not want to discuss.  And our intransigence to discuss the underlying politics ensures that the award becomes the ultimate scale to measure a personality.  Very rarely, though , the personality measures the award. What if albert Einstein had not won the nobel prize for physics ? would another physicist have respected the physics nobel after that..i doubt it..(i am personally of the idea that the nobels for the sciences are still worthy of the name. But myself being a  layman, could provide just  an amateur view)

So with the premise that an award is not just the measure of someone’s performance , we are obliged to explore as to what other components are signified when a person receives an award.

May be

1. The person is of the same political camp as the award giver
2. The awardee  ignores the   negatives of the award giver
3. The awardee is perfectly non political and excels in the field of his interest
4. The award giver wants to send a symbolic message to the opposite camp

Beyond this , there is one rare possibility that the awardee is a figure loved by people from all walks of life. The political implications of the act of giving creates  a space for the discourse for its counterpart. The act of refusing.  Refusing  an award is a symbolic rejection of the legitimacy of the awarding authority’s right to measure a person ‘s contribution . It is in itself as much a political act as it is a demonstration of self confident and assertive  heroism.

Milkha singh refused the padma shri for the same reason. His defiance was an indictment  of the pro cricket politics of the Indian government. Subhash Chandra bose’s family refused the posthumous bharat ratna  awarded to him, which can be considered as a criticism of the privileged  few who  treat bharat ratna as an essential familial commodity. 

These are precisely the reasons why one feels compelled to drop his  own worthless opinions into the boiling broth of the debate on “who should be given bharat rathna ?”

                                                                          “For me as a sports minister this is one of the biggest days of Indian sport and next biggest day I think will be the day when any sportsperson is named as an awardee of Bharat Ratna,” this is what the minister of sports ajay maken had to say when the decision to throw open the award to sportsmen  was taken(.this will enable sachin to get bharat ratna. )Politically i am wrong, ‘sachin and dhyan chand’. One tends to wonder of the innocence  of the Indian politician and lobbyist who have suddenly and naively , ‘discovered’ dhyan chand.  When dhyan chand died of liver disease, he was a bitter man , penniless and largely forgotten. And i am sure, if there was no wiki pedia, most Indians would have had no one to answer for them , the perennial question of Indian sports ,”who is dhyan chand” ?

I have expressed my opinion too many times about the greatness of sachin that i do not wish to risk additional physical injuries for my thoughts. So i want to go into the mind of the lobbyists who want to award sachin tendulkar the highest civilian award of the nation.  The case is made out as though it is inconceivable that a person of sachin’s stature is without a bharat ratna.  That irks somewhere in a nation where the professional footballers clean the seats of the cricket stadia to get some extra pocket money. What does it mean to lobby for an award ,for a person,  even if he had clearly proved his dominance in his field of work , when there are more pressing issues in the same field and the person is quite young himself? What kind of cunning calculation allows somebody to dig out the legend of dhyan chand and project it side by side as a sort of legitimizing act  for the former  crass9obviously) suggestion? It means a  lot. It requires a mediocre mind , of which we have aplenty. However, it also means a politics of purposely projecting a hero in the Indian mind , linking sports with national honour and a contrive association of greatness with patriotism.

It is also necessary to make out the beneficiaries of such a move. As sure as anything else, the corporate houses for which sachin has been the relentless poster boy, will gain a big boost. More incentives for the unrecognised cricketers , chicken soup for the  cricket industry, (!) more and more advertisements , felicitations ,  huge placards , flexboards, commemorating the feat, and also subjugation of other sports beneath the overpowering weight of the skyscrapers of BCCI. And they are the ones who parade for tweaking of the rules to help sachin tendulkar get his rightful due. I wonder why everyone does not see the irony of reading out sachin tendulkar anecdotes seriously . after all we are the ones who enjoy a good hearted laugh about rajni kant’s version of chuck Norris facts.

But strangely, men in india are not all that naive. There has been a marked criticism of this lobbying by people of noted reputation such as the respected judge markandeya katju. However, in this regard, i  differ with him because he has not taken into account the fundamental politics behind all award giving. His tireless promotion of the ‘right kind of heroes’ who need to be brought back into the deculturised public perception, is an utopian vision of the ageing generation- a generation that has rightly observed the decadence of values in a sea of consumerism .

However,  the politics of award has a logic of its own. Everyone and every faction has a perception of the ‘right kind of ‘ heroes they want to promote. I do not doubt for one instant   people like mr katju  would revive in the dusted corridors of public memory the forgotten and un recognised personalities whose relevance to the current world is altogether obvious. on the other hand, take for instance, the persons , a bjp government would prefer as the ‘right kind of heroes’. Their politics would point to someone like v d savarkar; Shyama Prasad mukerjea; this would develop into  an awarding game of bizarre proportions in an already pestilential  environment of acknowledgements.

Nay, sir. India needs heroes . but they are not present in the yellowed pages of history, but in the sweaty soils of the present. Have you ever heard of  a person as selfless as dr binayak sen? A rare gem of a doctor who chose to work in the tribal villages of central india after an education ,extraordinarily intelligent persons would die to lay hands on, he has been a person who stands  for civil liberties to the tribals. His political stand is one reason why he was not given  even a padma shree when lobbyists like sant singh chatwal get padma bhushan. (chatwal has recently  been alleged of malfeasance). But then , the chattisgarh government had decided dr.sen  should wear the crown of thorns-perhaps because that is the only laurel truly righteous men deserve to  get- and had him behind bars.

Another dimension ; how far would the ‘right kind of heroes’ stay in public discourse because of a bharat ratna award. How many of us remember the last bharat ratna awardee.? To me, the angst of justice katju can only be solved when children in school, are taught history with the same passion as they are taught  computers.

The contrasting images of those historical men who were rebels in their contemporary societies and the pathetic members of  ' generation  next'  lingering inside the golden bars of a dangerously' near- true'  digital world need not be stressed upon too often. I  now remember with regret the ground floor kid who is in his tenth standard, who replied with indifference , that he does not know who bhagat singh was . Believe me, he has not even heard of him. He knows the life history of sachin tendulkar upside down. He can talk at length about steve jobs and suresh raina and create powerpoint presentations in a jiffy.

I do not want to be seen as the vendor of pessimism , but reality hits very hard .  justice katju’s  lofty ideals are something that i would recall with nostalgia when thinking  of these times, thirty years from now. By then, sachin tendulkar would have been knighted .

And if we are lucky enough, he might be the president of india . there would be an award in the name of saibaba. I only pray the latter award does not replace  bharat ratna  as the highest civilian award.

 p.s. the oscar is an euphemism for all the awards here- if that clarification is required for those who want to be obsessively right..

the rise of the new woman - mayakkam enna vis a vis 7th sense

Only recently I have learned that it is usually not safe to voice your own opinion of   a movie when it is overwhelmingly disliked and ridiculed by an audience. Since our audience can tolerate to a great extent extremely poor movies without making noise in the theatres( how do you explain the movies of dr.vijay) , if they are totally pissed off with a movie, then it must mean that the movie is an extremely good one.

Mayakkam enna belongs  to the latter category. However for  physical safety reasons, I kept my views when asked as “oh it is  a boring movie”

After watching 7th sense, I felt that it was mindless of me to go and watch a movie in theater anymore . the whole movie was an exercise in revulsion . till then  I had not approved of kamal hassan’s weak attempt at intellectual antics, but after that movie, I decided the entire family is not to be trusted.  Their capacity to let down an expectant audience seems to be a genetically inherited trait that it seems only the  bodhi dharma technique will cure that family and bless tamil cinema.
 To my surprise, it seems the tamil audience bought the movie without much thinking, apparently they have forgiven a lot of movies on their way to blockbustership.   They have created super stars and little super stars for a lot of wrong reasons  and it is understandable they have begun to wait for the maitreya , sorry, oops , bodhi dharma ….

  Jokes apart, my cousin’s marriage served as an occasion to reconsider my decision to boycott movies in theatres. Mayakkam enna was a fresh breath  of air… a fragrant change in a whirlwind of obscenities.  It  was a statement of courage and reaffirmation of conviction in one’s own vision of cinema. It is not without its own faults but it has to be pointed out that it is a significant step away from the garbage brand that directors like murugadoss and gautam menon  seem to be fostering in the name of a new wave in tamil cinema .hence its weaknesses has to be understood in that perspective rather than  than a strict admonition of its mistakes.

Mayakkam enna  can be classified in the genre of the underdog genius movie – an unrecognized  talent - a prodigy gone wrong and redeemed by ‘love’- most notable example being the beautiful mind by ron howard .

It is the life of two extraordinary people  whose defiant attitudes and reckless vibrancy sets them apart from the lesser mortals they are obliged to live with. At the first look it may seem like the movie is about karthick swaminathan who struggles to gain recognition in the merciless world of wildlife photography but a much deeper look reveals that it is as much about , (if not more) his counterpart yamini who is relentless in her beliefs  about what entails her life’s mission.  In fact, the film can only be understood in terms of her character, as the whole movie is roughly divided into two halves – before and after their marriage and the seemingly contrasting approaches of yamini towards life before and after marriage .

She is the modern girl who is willing to date a guy(sundar) who pesters her  to be his girlfriend ..she does so because she is confident about herself and knows her limits .at the same time, her independent disposition allows her to be open about her attraction towards his friend , karthick.  She is not the timid sort who accepts the so called mis fortunes of womanhood that other silverscreen ideal women do not miss a chance to preach about.  
After the marriage, she does not give up after her husband goes near -insane because she knows what does it take in the modern world to follow one’s dreams.. following one’s heart in this consumeristic , globalised world is to be not available as a commodity in the market and hence not exactly profitable in money terms.. it makes one go mad but the madness is the path to liberation in a creative life and sidestepping that  process only breeds mediocrity .it needs a loving heart to empathise the torture such a mind has to undergo before it comes out with the phoenixoid creativity ..yamini is one such  woman who knows the eccentricity of a genius as well as the paltry opportunism of his friends who seek her as an object of lust(the scene in the car) . she is a woman of the world, who can choose to do what she believes is right, even to the extent of not talking with her husband because his act of violence aborts their child. The movie ultimately moulds a new woman , who knows where both her foci and loci lie. Do u even want to compare her with the daughter of siddha vaidhyar who stands as the champion of recombinant tamil identity , miss subha srinivaasan…( all she does is  a few hip twists in a half dozen songs while mouthing loaded dialogues in a funnily new slang of horrible tamil)

.  selva raghavan  constructs the character of karthick swaminathan in dhanush quite flawlessly and I think it is parallel to the effort one saw in the protagonist of kaadhal konden, albeit with a lot more elan. Dhanush proves again that perhaps he is the only consistent young actor worth the name in tamil cinema industry .one can easily contrast his extraordinarily ordinary face and its raw expressions with the paucity of the more handsome and much acclaimed (though without justice) surya who looks humbled by any scene demanding challenging acting.. I do not remember any other actor who can  do with so many close up shots . in a  countless number of scenes , dhanush proves his mettle..take for example the frustration with which he confronts the plagiarist madhesh krishnaswamy  after his photograph is published in national geographic, or the silent zen like meditated state he goes to, as he watches a leaf descend  while stalking the cormorant, or the recklessness with which he breaks the head of  his best friend’s bride  with a bottle .Kudos, flawless performance.

The film also talks about hitherto untalked or less talked areas. The confusing web of relationships that exist in the life of the earning cyber youngsters, the discriminations that exist in elite fields such as photography, the debate on whether creativity is gifted or acquired ,  the practicality with which illicit relationships are approached by modern youth, plagiarism  .. all these are quite new to tamil cinema except as a casual references  till now.

 There are a lot of glitches on the technical side , though..the graphics are unconvincing..the final sequence when he becomes the best photographer and receives an award looks like an attempt to bring forth the feel of  A BEAUTIFUL MIND..sorry, selva, it looked too artificial for a movie like this..

Perhaps selva raghavan’s biggest problem is himself.he has truly the marks of a great director, what he needs is the confidence to completely explore his cinematic language and that can only come with the recognition that is his due..

It is the most encouraging sign of a new tamil cinema I have seen this year.. welcome back , selva… after the debacle of aayirathil oruvan

A SERIES OF SO CALLED POETRY

3.INTERPRETING MIRACLES

he never said he would walk on water

neither did he attempt it in the neighbourhood lake

he never brought pastries from thin air,

nor did he vanquish snakes 

slithering through our hallways ..

and it never rained 

when he played the flute..

but 

the day he died,

there was a strange fragrance 

in the house of our dirty streets..

people who used his believing heart

to run their errands

and scoundrels who trampled over the flowers 

of his incredible naivety

lost their sleep in their cosy beds..

children thronged his corpse,

still laughing over the bland dragon flies

and vividly colored bananas 

he gave them everyday..

the rain that started after 

the funeral 

went on for three days and three nights..

 just before the pall bearers came

and the hearse was almost ready,

a leaf from our porch tree

slowly descended to the ground..

when the little boy picked it up 

with curious hands,

somehow , we  remembered his grandfather's

guileless smile..

 that was when we saw him 

arise from the corpse ,

and walk past the mourners,

offering his shoulder 

yet again ,

to the pall bearers...

laughing aloud 

to himself, 

as he narrates to them

another of his meaningless 

and empty jokes..

A SERIES OF SO CALLED POETRY

2. INTERPRETING FAILURES.


.a failure may mean many things,

anything,...

 

a failure means 

the world has shut its door,

first time , another time or the last time ..

a failure means 

your sweaty time 

has wailed over the 

pendulums for nothing

in the neighbor's eyes ..

a failure may mean(thus)

your neighbor 

need not be a friend, 

not necessarily..

a failure means 

your confident sureness of yourself 

will henceforth be a drunken boast ..

a failure means 

you have to prove again 

to justify your not being a burden..

a failure means 

instructions from all corners 

to refine yourself 

to the standards of contemporary success;

to decipher the TEACHINGS that failure

"imparts"

a failure 

PLAINLY MEANS 

you have not succeeded 

plus or minus reasons or excuses

a failure means 

once again you are lonely...