Orange

I am on a roll tonight. 3 blogs in a day or in the space of a few hours. Looks overwhelmingly that I do not want to study tonight!

Well, I saw Orange a few days back and a slightly abridged version. Somebody played around with some of the scenes. My take still on the movie...

I loved the way Bhaskar (the director) was so brutally honest in an otherwise ostrich like industry. In a time where the standard plot is Love Story+Factionalist Angle, he actually dared to make a pure love story with very little action. These action sequences were anyway included to pander to the Megastar fans.

This also brings me to one of my rants. Such a beautiful story line killed by the commercial elements, fans of the Megastar and of course the Megastar himself.

A guy is underwhelmed by a nagging and suspicious girlfriend. Poisons the guy's outlook towards relationships. He starts believing that love is temporary. The movie does a good job so far. It falters when the director starts looking for the Happy Ever After Closure.

I have a few doubts which I seek to clarify myself in the absence of adequate responses from the director. Why is the movie set in Sydney? For the Opera House backdrop? So that the heroine could wear outfits that no middle class male in India would even fantasize of? Or did the hero/producer never go to Australia and wanted to have a look around?

There was one scene where the hero shows the heroine a lion in a jungle or lets say the CGI version of it. Firstly, if ever, one tried to scream at a lion or come out of the car when the lion is standing on the bonnet of the car, I suspect, I would see the remains of the people saved by the lion for the hyenas. Also, are there lions in Australia? For real? In the jungle? Not in the zoo?

Loved the fact that Mr.Brahmanadam read MBs in the movie. Just could not figure out what Srinivasa Avasarla was doing in the movie? He did not even do an item number.

Final thoughts, do you think it is feasible that your passion for a person remains unchanged with time? I am not sure. I think possibly respect and affection might remain unchanged. Instead of highlighting similar points, the director gets scared and we are treated to a scene where the hero realises the error of his ways. For how long are we going to live in the sarson ka khets of DDLJ?

My Life?

A year back I had written with some intensity about my decision to give up a job and pursue a PhD. I am still not sure if I have all the answers in my life. I am still not sure if am doing the right thing and for the right reasons. But having decided on something, I want to give it the best shot that I can...

Have things changed in the last one year? I guess not. The need for approval still remains - exacerbated by the fact that I am a student and am continuously getting evaluated whether I like it or not.

What I can definitely say for sure is that I am getting waylaid by the same malaises that attack most students namely facebook and you tube. Need to find some way of getting my life back on track. Aaagh!

When do you say goodbye?

Do we ever say goodbye to our loved ones? Is it even feasible to say "I love you" to a loved one? It feels so filmy to even write about it, forget about ever saying it. Nanagaru used to quote this dialogue from a Hindi movie "Dard ka Rishta" - "Dard ka Rishta saha jaata hai, kaha nahin jaata". I still wonder.

What is goodbye? Are we ever able to say farewell? Thoughts keep impinging on memory. Are you ever able to move on? Is carrying the intensity of the feeling a sign of never achieving closure? Death is the final departure, but it is still not feasible to say goodbye. They say that Indian rituals deaden you to accept the finality of death. But why then do I keep looking over my shoulder to see if you are still there with me? Those tears when I don't even know that they exist. Those reminiscences that I thought time dimmed. That desperate feeling of regret for the moments that I know that I would forget with time even when I don't want to. That feeling of regret that the people I would love in the future would never get to know you.

Every time I see Vaaranam Aayiram, I get overwhelmed by the same feelings. I am not sure if I am investing too much into a movie that possibly doesn't deserve this part of me, but somehow a bit of me is forever locked in this movie.

Nostalgia

During my undergraduate years one of my friends told me the distortions that nostalgia creates in ones mind. I was too immature to understand it then. I am beginning to understand it now.

As a kid, I used to live in Dalli-Rajhara. I am sure that even people in Bhilai-Durg would be hard pressed to locate it on the map. The high points in our lives were the visits to Bhilai. One could travel by road or by train. Since we always traveled by train, I had a marked fascination to travel by road. Another reason to prefer the road journey was a fantastic small eatery which sold amongst other items - "Gulab Jamuns". Now, nostalgia has created a memory of taste and smell which not even the best Gulab Jamuns from Kolkatta or Delhi have been able to displace. Sometime back, Amma and I decided to go on a long drive and went all the way to Gunderdahi after a singularly bad lunch at Brindavan. Gunderdahi is one of those 10 shops, a railway station and a bus stand kind of small town in interior India. A quick scan of the 10 shops enabled us to locate the dhaba of my childhood memories.

Alas! the Seth who used to run the show had gone into retirement and allowed the standards of the dhaba to fall. The Gulab Jamuns did not match the taste that Nostalgia had registered in my brain. It made me regret my journey to Gunderdahi and shatter the memory of "The Taste". I guess I will now not go to Pulla Reddy in Hyderabad and shatter a few more of my "Tastes".

Back home...at last

I had forgotten what it was like to stay with parents and in a small town. Bhilai amazing as it is has its own peculiarities. I was trying to do a pros and cons of living in small towns (and I am trying not to be cynical here)

Pros:
1. Fantastic home food
2. A home that resembles a wild life sanctuary for insects and reptiles. (Why was I ever not interested in becoming a naturalist?)
3. Reconnect with my Bhilai relatives and friends
4. Become a minor celebrity for having traveled beyond Raipur
5. Movie ticket prices not exceeding Rs. 50

Cons:
1. Excitement in life: Snake crawling and climbing up the mango tree
2. My Mom not realising that I am not 15
3. No newspaper :-(
4. Conversations on how others kids are growing up

Airport blog

Yesterday I finally resigned from Cognizant. It felt weird after working like a dog for 5 years. I am still not sure why I resigned. Is it because I want to do a PhD or is it because I needed a break? I am right now in the airport and have to catch a flight to Delhi. There is barely an hour for the flight. I am in Starbucks and slowly all the pent up emotions and feelings are starting to catch up. Last night I was frantically trying to pack with Reena really doing the bulk of the work for me. I now have leisure in a long time to actually look at my decision with a degree of scepticism and maybe fairness.

I have long felt like a failure in my job not able to do anything well. This I guess stems from two things – a certain amount of perfectionism and also a craving for approval from everybody. While perfectionism is good to a certain degree, it is the craving for approval that scares me. I have always been afraid of failure. I thought I had overcome it when i was in my early twenties and even tried to live it up, this failing has caught up with me again.

During my entire stint in Cognizant I was trying to be something that I did not want to be. Obsessed with success, not taking time to do things that I really wanted to do, basically not balancing my life. It is always easy to blame somebody else for one's failures, but if I take a hard look at what I was in the past 5 years, I was obsessed by success, wanting something more than what others had-completely greedy.

I think I wanted a break from that. Even now, as I am sitting in the airport, I have nothing left in Cognizant. However, I am still scared of the legacy that I am leaving behind, what others think of me. I am worried if I cleaned my laptop effectively. I am worried if I inadvertently left back any personal data. I am worried about the minutiae of life rather than see the grand picture.

In my last stint as well, I think one of my failures was to get involved in details and not see the big picture effectively. With all these failings, do I have what it takes to be a good researcher? Will I ever be able to give gyaan aka the late Mr. Prahlad? Is it worthwhile making all these sacrifices if I am not Mr. Prahlad? Should I have been just satisfied being a middle manager who is good in some ops activities and making some presentations?

I am not that good at networking, do not make friends easily and feel very conscious giving lectures (although I cannot stop once I start). Am I taking the right decision?

Continuing from my previous post, I heard that one of my acquiantances in Hyderabad threw a going away party for their son who was traveling to the US to do some course in some university in the US. The kid had finally arrived :-).