The Importance of Being Idle

I don't mind
As long as there's a bed beneath the stars that shine
I'll be fine, if you give me a minute, a man's got a limit
I can't get a life if my heart's not in it

--Oasis

Everybody seems to think I'm lazy
I don't mind, I think they're crazy
Running everywhere at such a speed
Till they find there's no need (there's no need)

Please, don't spoil my day, I'm miles away
And after all I'm only sleeping

Keeping an eye on the world going by my window
Taking my time

Lying there and staring at the ceiling
Waiting for a sleepy feeling...

Please, don't spoil my day, I'm miles away
And after all I'm only sleeping

-- The Beatles

[Photo Credit: Sushmit Ghosh]

You're right, this blog IS getting too heavy. 

I think I need to step down the evolution ladder and become a single-celled organism. An Amoeba. That's done then. 

I also think that morning's are a great time for these wonderous thoughts to emerge...my ancestors believed that the morning was a sacred time. It's true. 

I am moping around work in my Osho chappals, my hands in my back pocket, checking out my reflection on transparent doors, wondering how fat I am. I don't want to think how fat I am or will be someday. Why are we multiple-celled organisms? 

Sloppy amoebas have it good. They can pro-create on their own too without intercourse. Why would they do that though.... 

I think I want to be an animal then. 

No, don't wana end up on a plate with my mouth open. Single-cells are just fine, with their one nucleus, mitochondria and jazz. A refreshing new habitat. 

I'm just a little person

What is it about Charlie Kaufman, that throws you into the delight of complication?
What a feeling. I'll call this the Kaufman emotion - one that I feel after watching anything written by him, or as right now in the film Synechdoche, New York ---his first directorial venture.

Oh Charlie, you speak to my soul...in the same convoluted manner that we all speak to our own souls and those of others around us. Because this is your story....and also ours. Exactly how Cayden in Synechdoche says, "There are millions of people in the world. And none of those people are as an extra, they're all leads in their own stories."

In this film, he has so successfully given some words, characters and visuals to the ever difficult questions of life and death. Questions we ask ourselves at so many points of life. When the character of Cayden (fashioned after Kaufman himself?) is not sure of what he is trying to achieve through the concept of his next play, his actress (played by Michelle Williams) says, "It's good that you don't know...when you know that you don't know, it is the first step to knowing."

The beautifully and immaculately constructed screenplay, is nothing but the circle of life that gives birth to its real, fictional and on-stage characters, lives and dies like a being and a world unto its own.

"The end is written into the beginning".....a line uttered by Cayden's love-interest........says it all for me. For it is isn't it in any written, spoken story just like life? A story that goes on and on, and never sees an end till death. Yet, it still goes on.
And as always, Kaufman blows you away with that one long monologue from one of his characters:

"As the people who adore you stop adoring you; as they die; as they move on; as you shed them; as you shed your beauty; your youth; as the world forgets you; as you recognize your transience; as you begin to lose your characteristics one by one; as you learn there is no-one watching you, and there never was, you think only about driving - not coming from any place; not arriving any place. Just driving, counting off time."

Some of the songs have been written by Kaufman himself......and my favourite goes, "Somewhere maybe someday maybe somewhere far away............."

I cannot express myself anymore. Excuse me, as Cayden says, "It's Complicated."

Handmade Productions Present.........

Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds

Mis-en-scene: Harmanpreet Kaur :)

Meditative Rose by Dali

"I don't do drugs. I am drugs."

Salvador Dali

Old and Gold.........some pictures from Delhi -6

[Photo Credit: Harmanpreet Kaur]

Time Warped 

Whenever I visit a historical monument I'm struck by the fact that I am existing in two time periods. The present and the past. I feel I'm passing through pillars of infinite stories entrenched in their bricks, and floating in the space between them. What had passed through these, centuries ago? Star-crossed lovers or players of political intrigue? 

Aren't we encasing time all the time? In our architecture, our dwellings, our walls, and forms of art and businesses. We will come and go, but these will remain, and be at the mercy of those who come later.  

We are time-travelling all the time. There is a time-machine. Inside us. If we can go back in time through our memories, can we do that physically too someday? And can embedded clairvoyance be perfected to know the future? This stuff of Science-fiction is definitely plausible. 

But do we want to do that? Is the mystery of the order.....best left mysterious? 

Meanwhile, I'm still happy to revisit old forts, and spin yarns of the past and the future in an alternate reality.  

All this reminds me of a movie - that I've never been able to watch in it's entirety - Kate & Leopold (2001). Meg Ryan and Hugh Jackman. The tagline says:

 

"If they lived in the same century they'd be perfect for each other." 

I've never guaged this one - a romantic science fiction sort, where two people meet across time periods. No, I'm not anti-love or anti-imagination.......and maybe I'm just being my cynical self.....but I don't get it! Maybe I'll re-visit it someday to get over my prejudices, because I genuinely like this quote from the film:

"Time. Time, it has been proposed, is the fourth dimension. And yet, for mortal man, time has no dimension at all. We are like horses with blinders, seeing only what lies before us. Forever guessing the future and fabricating the past." 

Idiot-ing the Box

"You know the first and greatest sin of the deception of television is that it simplifies; it diminishes great, complex ideas, trenches of time; whole careers become reduced to a single snapshot."

Those are the words of the character James Reston Jr from Ron Howard's Frost/Nixon...and one of the many moments in this engrossing film, that made me really feel the interlacing of politics, media and power.

When I saw All the President's Men, it spoke to me not just a story of a momentous turning in the history of American politics, but it made me feel the power of print journalism. Frost/Nixon however, reveals the inherent dichotomy of television journalism for me. An anchor who is more of a performer, backed by serious researchers buying his way into an interview of a lifetime.....botching it, due to the nature of his subject, trying to save it....and only succeeding because of the nature of his subject.

It's a challenge to simplify complex issues in television journalism. And a bigger challenge not to oversimplify complexity, and remove it altogether. Love it or hate it - the tele won't go even if Werner Herzog says....."Our grandchildren will blame us for not having tossing hand-grenades into TV stations because of commercials."

Out of my deeper heart a bird rose and flew skywards.

Higher and higher did it rise, yet larger and larger did it grow.

At first it was but like a swallow, then a lark, then an eagle, then as vast as a spring cloud, and then it filled the starry heavens.

Out of my heart a bird flew skywards. And it waxed larger as it flew. Yet it left not my heart.

Kahlil Gibran

Through my lens, looking at you

I love the feeling of strangers smiling into my camera. Travel Portraiture fascinates and haunts me. I wish I could capture every face I saw. Every face I see. Some pass by so quickly and stay in my mind forever. Some smile, while others stare through.

I enjoy imagining what it'd be like for that cute American or Spaniard to spot himself in one of my photographs online on sharing websites like flickr.com. Would I fill him/her with the same joy as they filled me with? Not just when my shutter clicked, but endlessly as I look at them now and then. These collection of faces are not just pictures of people frozen in time. They are experiences. A Treasure trove of real people, preserved in photo chemicals. 

That they are strangers, makes them more attractive and mysterious. I dream about their back-stories and write these set of words........for you and for them.

Look at Me

As I look at You

My Lens is your Mirror,

And my Window

To your Soul

Say what you feel

With your Face

And I'll preserve You

Spacial Void

It began from a void

An Emptiness 

Hollow and bare

But a million particles

Burst open

Life, small and big

Yet alone

In a mass of humanity

In our loneliness

We must bear

Exude and Consume

Ourselves

Tiny specks of Air

Random atoms

and Molecules

Zipping across lanscapes

Searching, uniting, breaking

Living and dying

In this spacial void

-- Harman, 03-03-09