Deconstructing Deconstruction

So I figure I've written enough reviews to figure that I need not write another. Was it worth it? Definitely. At first, deconstructing everything is really painful. When I started, I could not watch or read anything without constantly thinking what I'm going to write about in my review. Whole sentences would be forming in my head as I saw a movie. I'd think of suitable adjectives as I read my book. I'd exhort myself to remember things to write in the review that would inevitably follow. I didn't like it at all. But slowly, as the conscious act of deconstructing became more natural, it ceased to be a conscious act at all. All the very many movies I'd seen with one eye on the review have, it seems, greatly enhanced my appreciation of movies of general. I enjoy what I read now much more simply because I spent so much time obsessing about the essences, the details, the many layers of meaning. I guess writing all those reviews taught me to pay more attention, to see a new way of seeing. It taught me to recognise techniques, and recognise their application in variouses guises. How does one develop space in a story? How does one develop space in a song? If Tom Hanks is on a raft in the middle of the ocean and he's tuning the radio, why did the writer choose that he tune into an old pop song? If a number is written on a wall in the hypercube, why does it start with 1111? One learns a lot when one pays attention. But, even so, I feel I've written my last review for the time being. It's getting harder and harder to whip up the enthusiasm for them. I'm running out of adjectives too :-) Sometimes I read reviews in the Sunday papers and thank my stars I don't have to do it for a living. Besides, some things - and I believe that the best of art is like this - defy deconstruction. They frustrate any attempts at imposing order, or cliched sentences on them. They say more than you can put into words. With some things, it is better to just let them be. Where deconstruction ends, poetry can start.

Star Wars III The Revenge of the Sith - Movie Review

Very impressive! A wonderful story told in magnificent fashion. After the disappointment of the first two episodes, I was all set for further crap from George Lucas but he blew me away quite unequivocally. Well, not quite so unequivocally. The start was pretty pathetic in terms of writing, acting etc. Everyone seemed so wooden to start with that I decided to just concentrate on the special effects, which were magnificent. Each frame in this movie was something special. The attention to detail that ILM has put into the effects in this movie was something else. After a few minutes, I slowly found myself getting totally absorbed in the story, in the Chancellor's powerlust, in Anakin's doubt and greed, in Padme's hopeless situation. I loved the politics of the movie - the Republic, the emergency powers of the Chancellor, the conversion of the Federation into Empire! So this is how liberty is lost, says Padme. With thundering applause. I'm halfway through Karl Popper's "The Open Society and it's Enemies" and this movie was so much a reflection of all that he's been saying so far. It was a nice coincidence for me. Did I mention that the special effects were simply mindblowing. Even the scenes where they have the city as a backdrop were stunning. The fights were riveting. Everything was simply a visual feast. And in the end, we get Lord Vader! We get Lord Vader and the Emperor looking out at the half constructed Death Star and we get Owen and Beru Lars looking at the young Luke and the twin suns of Tatooine. What a movie! Fantastic! I really liked the fact that the sets in the end of the movie looked so much like the original star wars trilogy. In the scene where the emperor and Lord Vader are overseeing the construction of the death star, it looks exactly like a shot from Return of the Jedi, the continuity was amazing. While there were many many things that were wrong with this movie, I have to say that I thoroughly enjoyed watching it.

Life of Pi by Yann Martell

What a great book! It started of a bit iffy though. The writing was poor, but fresh and somehow innocently charming. It made me laugh, but even so I couldn't seem to look beyond Martell's "orange Thumbs Up" and his Sufi Mr. Kumar. I thought it was a poorly researched piece of writing. A foreigner using India for exotica. I still think that, since the start of the book could have been set anywhere for all the difference it made to the rest of the book. The rest of the book is a pure pleasure to read though. When he ends up on the lifeboat, I expected the worst of magic realism to spew forth from the author but he wrote with remarkable restraint. I like books with very stark settings. A lifeboat, a tiger and the Pacific does that quite well. And without the help of a single fantasy element, Yann Martell tells a wonderful story with many levels. Pi is alone on a lifeboat with a tiger, but instead of despairing he learns to control his elements. He uses all his ingenuity to keep himself and the tiger alive. He walks a fine tightrope between providing the tiger with food and being food himself. Out there in the middle of the Pacific, he trains a tiger to obey him. There has been no finer setting for a story in recent years, I say! One day, he goes blind and his lifeboat bumps into the lifeboat of another person, also blind, in the middle of the Pacific. Richard Parker eats him. Yann Martell waited till well into the second half of the book to spring what is perhaps the book's only wildly fantastic story. It was very nicely done. The start of the book talked a lot about God, but the end doesn't speak much about him. When Pi becomes all four religions in the start I thought it might lead to some heavy-hitting theology later on in the book, but fortunately for me, that never happens. It would have been boring. All in all a very satisfying book. Leaves one with a gentle smile, though somehow I doubt we'll see much more from Yann Martell.

FabMall

So since I've often praised FabMall in my previous posts, it's time for more honest appraisal of the online store. In one word: "What the..." Fabmall used to be so cool! They have lots and lots of books, the site worked well and their delivery was blazing fast. Not the prettiest site in the world, but it was basic and robust and there was no fuss involved. Over the past few weeks though, things have gone totally down the drain. Logins fail, the shopping cart continuosly forgets what was put into it, the connection with the bank fails. It has become impossible to buy a book on fabmall. And if you manage to get the shopping cart to work, then you find that the site's security certificate is invalid. I suppose some people might disclose their credit card numbers on such a site, but I'm not one of them. And of course, despite repeatedly emailing "Customer Support", there has been no reply. So, if you're having problems with FabMall, you probably should let them know. In the meantime, I'm using First and Second, which seems to work much better.

The Abolition of Work - A Short How-To

I just finished reading Bob Black's essay The abolition of work. It's a wonderful essay, and having read it I felt compelled to write this: There is no doubt that work, as it is carried out today, is a terrible thing. It fills one's day with mostly useless tasks and leaves one too tired to do anything useful with the time one has left. It invades and envelopes every aspect of one's existence. And many times, the more time one spends working, the more deeply one gets enmeshed in this pointless to-and-froing that we call a "job".

Bob Black's agenda is a little over the top in my opinion, and I think deliberately so. I'm not of the opinion that work should be "abolished". Neither do I want to look back with nostalgia at our idyllic hunter-gatherer existence because I'm not so sure that it was as nice as all that. However, with all the advances that the human race has made, it is about time that we abolish work, once and for all. For those that don't want it.

While we would all like to believe that everyone is smart enough to hate work, I'm almost certain that there are people for whom it is a good thing, or at least the lesser of two evils. Even if one were to assume a world in which everyone can survive without working for money, work would still have a place in the lives of some people. Some people like the illusory "security" of a job, like prisoners who feel safe on the inside. It's called institutionalisation. Some need a nice title on an embossed visiting-card to boost their self-esteem. Like prisoners obsessing over their shiny handcuffs, they proudly show off the trappings of their position in life - their ties, their leather shoes, their briefcases. Some people are too stupid to be left to their own devices.

There is no doubt in my mind the people are unequal. Where one draws the line between intelligence and stupidity is a personal matter but if nothing else, it would be overly autocratic to assume that abolishing work completely ("No one should ever work") is the correct thing to do. Instead of abolishing work for all, it might be worthwhile to consider how to abolish work for those who don't want it, and if my experience is anything to go by, there are far fewer of us than you might imagine. In the rest of the essay I will try and present the best way for abolishing work from your life. I have managed to do this myself and hope the experience might be helpful to others. Believe me, it is well worth it.

If one takes a look around, one would quite easily surmise that we have all the useful things we need. The vast majority of places on the face of the earth are accessible today, either physically or via a telecommunications medium. Enough things have been invented for us to lead comfortable lives. A lifetime is not enough to read all those great books and listen to all that wonderful music. Yes there are areas where we fall behind, but like the ancient Greeks did, I too believe that all useful things have been made and that it is now time to work on the more important issues - for them it was philosophy. If I were smarter, I would like to make that same claim, but at any rate I can still say that the marginal improvement in our lives from further obsession with baubles like cars and IKEA furniture is diminishing at an alarming rate. On a similar note, let me also say that there are many many things that we have too much off. Take cola for example. What is cola? Sugar, water, gas and a "secret ingredient". What does cola do? It neither quenches one's thirst, nor is the taste particularly appealing. It's value as a mixer for rum is also suspect. Why then, is my question, are the Cola companies so big? Why is it that when the Berlin wall comes down, there is a cola truck waiting to liberate those behind the wall? How is it that a company that makes cola's can pollute groundwater with the impunity that comes with great power? How can a company that makes sugared water pay Aishwarya Rai millions to be on its billboards? I say, enough cola. And in this simple manifesto, we can find the secret to abolishing work.

Just like the reason for buying cola is not the cola itself, most people spend too much time buying things for the wrong reasons. A flashy cell phone to show off. New threads to wear on Saturday night. The new Rabbi CD. These are the people who deserve to work. Let them. They help to maintain a system of mediocrity and unimaginativeness without which it would be much more difficult for us to lead lives of quiet contemplation. For the rest of us then, abolishing work becomes more or less a matter purely of choice. Or is it?

It is true that to not have to work is a privilege, and privileges have to be earned. In this instance, there are two necessary but individually insufficient ways to achieve freedom. The first is the internal (enough cola!) and the second is the external. First, the internal.

Given the clear relationship between a job and its remuneration, one needs to accept the abolition of one if one is to achieve the abolition of the other. Therefore, it comes down to whether you value cola more than freedom. If you're worried that you might never have enough money to own a house in Bombay, then you have to keep working. If you couldn't care less if the entire city gets swallowed up by garbage, then you're on your way. Wanting less is always a good way of needing less money, and therefore a good way of starting to rid yourself of employment. Of course there are those for whom it would be very difficult to want less, but they're not going to be reading this are they? If you can speak English and use the Internet, you will never have to worry about starvation, atleast in India. That much is sure. Whether you're willing to settle for the alternative is a different discussion, but to think that there is no alternative is to blind oneself. People will malign this as a neo-Gandhian, pseudo-Buddhist, adjective-adjective philosophy. You are free to do so. Once you're done with "things", you can start with habits. Alcohol habits, smoking tobacco or dope, ideally all of this should go. (A short note on quitting alcohol - quit your job first. Once you drop the misery, you can quite easily drop the booze as well).

Besides, owning too many things is such a problem. If you own a house, you're stuck in the city where the house is. If you have a lot of things, you get weighed down. Rooted. Not a good way to abolish work from your life because the trick of being able to work when one wants is to be flexible. Things tie you down, so not only does one have to work to acquire them but each acquisition is like one more brick in the prison wall. Sell everything. Enough Cola! Why live and struggle like rats in Bombay when you can have a perfectly decent life in more pleasant places like Pune, or Belgaum or Nainital? Or all those three places. But you can only do that if you own nothing but the bare minimum.

The second thing to do is to acquire a relevant skill. A skill is the moral opposite of a posession. It frees you. Perhaps this is easier said than done, but even so it is certainly easier to do this today than it was even a few years ago. If you have a relevant skill today, like being able to program a computer, and you are still stuck behind a monitor at a cube-farm like Infosys, then you probably deserve to work. I am all for paying one's dues when one is young, but to continue paying them because you have a mortgage on a pigeon-hole in an urban hell is, quite frankly, stupid. If you do not have a relevant skill, the best way to acquire it is by pursuing a hobby seriously.

I do not count "reading" and "watching TV" amongst hobbies. Infact, the single best way to get a hobby going is by getting rid of the TV set. All they do all day is try to get you to buy stuff by showing you stuff that they think you want to see. So just don't bother. I've checked time and again and there is never anything good on TV. Apart from these things though, there are many, many things you can do. A friend of mine used to be Bobo the Clown and organiser of children's parties in his spare time. You can do anything, it doesn't matter, as long as you do it well and with love. You might claim that the amount of time one spends at work and the way the work seeps into every waking and sleeping hour makes it hard to maintain a hobby. This however, is again a personal decision.

And besides, the finest skill one can have in an age where all knowledge is a google away, is curiosity, and surely that can be practiced anywhere. Asking questions leads to answers, and answers are valuable. Socrates said that the truly wise one is the one who is aware that he knows nothing, for it is only from acknowledging this that the quest for knowledge can start. We live in a "knowledge economy". It is time for everyone to upgrade.

Having skills allows us to get to step three of the process in abolishing work. Step three is - cooperate. Competition is for saps who want more cola. Once you decide that you have all the cola you could possibly want, then you're not going to feel bad if someone else gets more cola than you do. You won't worry about giving away cola to someone who needs it more than you do. There is no better way to abolish work for those who want it than to get all of them to cooperate. Bob Black's essay was written in the days before the Internet. With Orkut and Ryze and God-knows-what-else, the tools for cooperation are already there. If they are being used in a different spirit, I blame cola.

Step three, if it's ever achieved on a mass scale should then lead to step four - How to help the maximum number of people to escape? The answer lies in our schools, for it is nowhere else that children are set inexorably in motion to a life of quiet servitude. According to me, a school should have two basic functions - the imparting of basic skills and the arousal of curiosity. Let the clerks and accountants have their way, but shouldn't there also be a place for those who don't measure everything in numbers? It is for this that it is shameful (but by no means surprising) that our schools have become academies of indoctrination providing plenty of fodder for the machine. Where in the old days it was loyalty to a country or patriotism (an equally flawed concept), we now have loyalty to a whole new system of "world trade" or "global financial markets" and "conspicuous consumption" with the added advantage that most people believe they've chosen this life themselves. And even though I know that you and I can do nothing about this, it is still important to say it because even if we can't do anything it is still better to have the right attitude than the wrong one.

Anyways, this wasn't meant to be a rant on the economic system, just a short how-to on how to escape it. Best of luck.

Cube^2: Hypercube - Movie Review

The movie's about seven people trapped in a cube with no idea how they got there and no idea what they're supposed to be doing or how to get out. It seems a simple enough analogy of the existential problem, but treated with a depth of understanding and thought that is definitely above par. One of the seven is a mathematician. He starts off numbering the rooms but as he finds ever increasingly complex numbers, he develops increasingly complex methods and equations to try and make sense of them. It's a very trippy take on randomness, a concept that has somehow, randomly I suppose, managed to work its way into my reading these days. What I found most impressive about the film was the very tight canvas the writer has given himself. One cube. Some people. He can't introduce things at will and so each incident has to not only drive the story forward within this austere space, but at the same time be interesting because with a concept like this, it's the easiest thing in the world to bore your audiences to death. And in this small canvas, the writer has managed to talk about Nazi Germany, relationships, philosphy, many many things that I can't remember now by just refering to them in the most oblique way. I have to watch this movie again. It's on Star Movies these days but late at night. The best part? No commercial breaks! Though not so good if you're (as I was) having a beer with the movie. Also, this is a remake of Cube, the makers of which sadly have very slim credits but I'd be really interested in seeing what else they might have to offer. Guess there's always this one. The movie is on again at 1:00 PM Tuesday, May 17, 2005 and 3:00 AM Sunday, May 29, 2005. The Star Movies website has a nice "Remind Me" feature, but it doesn't seem to work.

Reef by Romesh Gunasekara

If you liked The God of Small Things, you will probably like this one too. I loved it! It's a slim volume, less than 200 pages, written with such love and affection that it's almost poetry. The book is set almost exclusively in a house in Colombo, written from the eyes of Triton, the servant boy. Absolutely nothing happens in the book. Triton comes to the house of Mr. Salgado and stays there, doing his work until one day they leave for England. Triton's life is simple. There is the house to look after, the cooking to be done and Mr. Salgado, an ordinary man, but what poetry there is in this world, this simple home with the shadow of dark times gathering in the lanes just outside and the shadows that each man casts in his soul. There are long passages devoted to cooking. There are haunting references to the impending bloodbath in Sri Lanka. Right at the end, Mr. Salgado asks Triton to remind him of the Anguli-mala story. Those of you who grew up in the subcontinent might remember the same story as the link, a simple tale of remorse. The way Triton tells it though, is like a sock in the jaw. He turns Angulimala's life into a Sysiphean task of cutting fingers, of killing and killing and killing, and all the time outside the house in Colombo, the death-squads are silently gathering. In the end, this book is all about the writing. It was shortlisted for the 1994 booker but didn't win, so I guess I got to read "How Late It Was, How Late" by James Kelman, even though some Booker winners can be totally unreadable.

The Great Indian Baccha Party

I was very angry last night after watching half of Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi, and when I woke up this morning, I knew why. HKA was meant to reaffirm my faith in Indian creativity and so it's failure was not just one bad film for me, but the loss of my hope that someone, somewhere in this country will do something worthwhile. Two nights ago in Bombay someone aptly described the Indian media/entertainment/art scene as a "baccha party" - the little league - and I am beginning to despair of ever seeing anything deeper than a baby-pool ever being made locally. I used to have this debate with friends about whether local talent should be given some leeway, some encouragement initially to nurture their growth, no matter how shit they are. Their side of the argument usually is that in an increasingly globalised world, everyone competes at a global level. Why should I watch Black when I can watch Wild Strawberries instead? Why buy an Indian band's album when I can download all the Grateful Dead I could possibly want. Just because it's Indian shouldn't affect your judgement of it. My argument was that yes, all that is true, but how about supporting them so that one day when (if) they come good, you'll have a worldclass filmmaker/band who lives and works in your city. You have local access to their work. Now I feel that they're right and I was wrong. These people will never grow out of their feeble-mindedness as long as everyone keeps telling them how great they are. It's one massive Mutual Appreciation Society. Look at what's on TV (or rather, don't!). Look at the films that are coming out. I watched Lagaan in London and felt ashamed, even more so when it got an Oscar nomination. Black? Please! HKA? An atrocity. This whole baccha party is being sponsored by big media and their connections and being lapped up wholesale by an upwardly-mobile MBA class that has no time to form any opinion other than what they read in the newspapers. It's a really happy situation for them when they can make money from "Chandu ke Chacha". Really desperate times for the rest of us. Of course there are notable exceptions. Indian Ocean is one band that continues to generate meaningful music. They don't insult the intelligence of their audiences like most everyone else does. "Dil Chahta Hai", "Monsoon Wedding" and "Mr. And Mrs. Iyer" were some great recent films made locally. There, I've run out of names. It's almost as if the rest of the artists think that we've never seen a movie or heard a song before in our lives. I'm sure there are plenty of films/bands/authors out there that I've never heard of that are doing amazing work. It's just not possible that there are none (one lives in hope), but the fact remains that whatever gets to the mainstream is just a joke. I truly believe that some of the stuff that reaches us started out well, and got messed up by the suits along the way. Suits hate radical thought. They like bubblegum, and as long as the tyranny of their business model persists, bubblegum is all we'll get. I don't see their business model lasting very long, what with the Internet and all, but are our indie artists worth it? Some might say that it's a question of money, but that's just making excuses. An average human being today has more equipment well within his reach than Bunuel could even have dreamed of. The constraints are gone, so where is the art? Show us the art! In the end, it's a question of attitude. Nobody does things for love anymore. Bands all over the country don't have the imagination to rise above the ritualistic aping of their succesful western counterparts. Filmmakers are lazy. Authors don't spend enough time on their sentences. How can someone from IIT/IIM now working a cushy job in Hong Kong write a novel worth reading? It takes time to craft the perfect sentence. It takes empathy to write a mood. It takes effort. These lazy bastards, I've had enough of them. Not one original voice to be seen for miles. The future looks bleak.

Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi - Movie Review

This is the absolute LAST time I get taken in by the hype. What a terrible movie. From the first scene itself I knew something was wrong. The gruesome riot completely silent....fuckall. The first thing that hits you about the film is the complete ineptness of the crew. All of them. The makeup artist, the cinematographer, the dialogue writer, the director, the editor, the actors. There. All of them did an utterly hamhanded job. The film looks more like a student diploma film than this so called "revolutionary" film by a Great Indian Director. The cinematography was appaling! No nuance, no composition. Terrible lighting. Yuck. The dialogue was atrocious, and delivered even worse by three total ham's. I mean the guy can't read a line properly in the voiceovers. Flub after flub afer flub. The editing was the only thing about the film that was authentic of the period i.e. abrupt cuts and jumps. Clumsy pacing. A monument to medicrity. The story itself is awful awful awful. Man, Sudhir Mishra's really disappointed on this one. I used to be a fan of his. I left in the interval. I wouldn't have if I hadn't got up to pee, but once I was outside the cinema I could think of no real reason to go back in and have my intelligence insulted for another hour. It strikes me as odd how someone as educated in the medium can make such a terrible movie. I read in some review that "But Chitrangada Singh, whose face draws inevitable comparisons to Smita Patil, is definitely someone to watch out for. She is a complete natural who zaps the camera with a passionate performance." Reminded me of Mira Nair comparing Rabbi to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. How can people be so fucking stupid? Also, the media somehow keeps calling this an internationally acclaimed film. Where, I want to know is the acclaim coming from. The media claims the film "won" the Fonds Sud and Montecinemaveritas awards but the truth is (as any google search will show) that the film was made with funding from these two agencies. It wasn't a prize, you lying bastards. Also, the hype about all the festivals it's been too. Well, let me tell you what else is playing at the DC Film Festival from India: Dil Se, Black, Raincoat, Morning Raga, Bawandar, Dev (yes, the Amitabh Bachchan one) Mughal-e-Azam and Choker Bali. Some fucking festival. Never ever trust the media, I tell you.