Roland Barthes

Embarrassed and almost guilty because sometimes I feel that my mourning is merely a susceptibility to emotion. But all my life haven't I been just that: moved?

The Somewhat Sad and Curious Evolution of Mitch Kramer

8 years on, he has left the sunny landscape of his hometown behind and the bunch of his youthfully naive and energetic freshman friends. Then on the doorstep of adulthood, full of hope and quiet joy, ready and itching for life's surprises, now we find him traversing an oneiric landscape, eager to understand life's myriad mysteries and the secret of existence. A hint of sadness accompanies him in this odyssey to enlightenment. There is a mellower sunlight and the nights are wrapped in a veil of mystery and hallucination. Under this surreal firmament and among objects dancing, wavy and shifting, he meets people, all strangers, shadowy, flickering- ephemeral phantoms who inhabit this dream valley like the blue vault of the ocean.

Who are these people he meets? What is this city? What happened to his sister, his friends, his parents? What happened him these years?...Why cant he escape his dreams? When will he wake up? what is this Hades of a city anyway? Is he Not alive? Why is the sunlight so unworldly mellow? Is it the other world? Is he paying us a visit from the beyond? This chain of dreams, will it never get broken? Trapped, forever, in dreams. The soaky darkness of the roots. Quietly falling, over the plateau. 

Before Sunrise

The streets you walked will be empty tomorrow
the cemeteries visited disrobed of their flowers
such is the fancy of time
though time is abstract
and delusion angels rule

Scattered Muttered

To be uptight is to defy Time. Her face flushed with seriousness. Tout with intent. The nosy bent towards life. Relaxed muscles, no tic. In harmony with time. Her beautiful tight round neck. The accent of the slender chain. Her big fawn eyes on you. What was she thinking? The world of the soul-substance. The other kingdom. Paradigm of obscure heathen dark. Wig of winter’s vast network. The enlightenment black hair. Bright with the Know. Specs looking through the eyes of the soul. 

The Other Kingdom

Wind blowing wild over a great marshland all covered with godly white snow. You will think that there is nothing else in the world but this holy marshland of silence. A gray sky meeting a gray marsh all over the horizon, exuding bodhisattva wisdom of nothingness which is our existence. All commotions are distant dreams. Happiness and discontent mere ideas. Minute fabrications of human mind which is but a dot in the great enveloping mystery of existence. Before commotion, there is silence. After commotion, there is silence. 

Distanced

There is a girl who lives not here. Her tender aspects create sublime contrast with the rocky terrain of that other land. I see her cruising up and down the undulating roads of that little town. Spangled jhola slung down  her shoulder, tidbits clasped to her bosom, her face serene. She walks alone in the sun. Little droplets of sweat trickle down her forehead and mingle with the serenity therein.

I look forward to the day I leave this madness behind and on a drowsy afternoon of the sun, sit by her side on a little bodhisattva rock and talk.

Drip Drip Dream Drum

I am here. This cubby hole hedges in on me. I do not particularly take to people around here. But this reality is not ultimate. Beyond this madness, lies another world, of senses, of sunlight, of little curious details that make us happy. A little sunny cottage in a small byroad habitat. The cottage is cosy, decent, practical, without extravagance, homey, comfortable. The approach to the house is open. There is no gate or fences. Around the yard, there are bushes, trees, undergrowth, a little stretch of flowerbed may be, but no dainty little garden. The back of the house opens up to billowy rolls of meadows.

Beyond one stretch of the meadow, there lies a little dense forest. There are old knotty trees with huge trunks. There is a fresh soggy fragrance in the air. The huge pools of shadows seem like little womb havens. I sit under a big bodhisattva tree trunk and meditate. As I close my eyes, the other senses grow keen. There is the soft rustle of the leaves. The soft caressing slender beams of sunlight rest on me in patches and keep me warm. I feel grateful for the fresh coolness around.

Woodles Doodled In Endlessly Stretching Non-active Office Hours

The lizards run
Across the wall
Having fun
In the morning sun
In the softened light
Their torrid flight
Blessed blessed
The torrid flight
The hearts of might
The hearts of right
In the scorching light
The endless spright…

……………...

Flying thick and fast
Hours of the past
Not mine, not mine
No point to pine
No point to pine
Hours flying
Thick and fast
The die is cast
        Catching rust
Was that my past?

……………...

Big little pills
Big little pills
Go pop down the throat
Cure itch in the bones
Cure hitch in the souls
Big little pills
Mama’s secret
To zeal
Big little pills
They never never kill.

Another feeble & tottering tattering roughshod roughhandled remnant of a book cover. Like the old Jack Dulouz of the book, just as old, beaten, frightened, lost, hopeful, gutsy, searching, bleary-eyed, oneiric, subhuman remains of an earlier perfection.

Below, the back cover.
BANTAM BOOKS, Sep 1963.

Platitudes

I meant no harm
Newspapers
Valentine’s Day
Oh the hills
Abol Tabol
Dear readers,
Red Converse shoes
Bottlegreen Converse Shoes
Marriage
Save Tiger
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever
Work ethics
Lady Gaga
A Clockwork Orange
Libido
Limericks
Scams
Blogging
Oh My
Gracias

The cover of a book I recently bought second hand. Liked it too much not to scan and post. Liked the guitar, the wine, the rose, the sword, the monastery, the conifers and the sea. the monastery btw reminds me of the monastery in Vertigo.

Oh the Sun! Oh the Spring!

Sentient beings, all around us. Every piece of tiny bit life. Men, ill-directed and women. The air thick and heavy with messages. Flowing in from the mountains, trees, brooklets for they are also sentient beings. At a distance from the ground, a dazzling sun. Keep distance from the chatter and keep looking for bodhisattvas.

Musings inspired by a blithe early spring morning. reeking of Jack Kerouac. 

A Dog Day Night, A Friend and World Movies

Alongside the biopics, the latest craze in Bollywood over the last years has been the filmisation of real-life events. The ones making the cut are naturally the ones with enough blood and gore and sensation in them, preferably seasoned with a pinch of love and betrayal stuff. Ones crammed with enough masala ingredients, that is. During the 2008 Mumbai attack, I remember coming upon a piece of snippet news about how the producers were already lining up to book and buy their rights to film the event, even before the whole grisly saga was over.

Now one would think that there is nothing wrong with turning real events into films and there isn’t. The problem occurs however with the brazen manipulation of the events and the insensate treatment they are often meted with. Thus making the filmmakers only one in a long line of parties- including politicians, tv channels, newspapers- intent on cashing in on these generally unfortunate events. Commonly it comes down to this- they take the bare skeleton of the story, flesh it out with their own expedient imagination, then advertise it, either directly or through channels of rumour, as a faithful account of the original event (or, at least one based around it), with any glaring deviations from it left to be interpreted as exercises in artistic liberty. Result is the average potboiler as far removed from the original event as Haiti from Honolulu. You have your Gangsters for example.

Now if Bollywood has caught up with this fad only recently, it has never been out of fashion in the tinseltown by Los Angeles, though. Instances are just aplenty to mention separately. That which merits mention however is that the scenario over there is hardly any more encouraging. So things being as they are, it was more than a happy surprise when one day last week, in the wee hours of the morning, I caught up with this Sidney Lumet classic, Dog Day Afternoon, at World Movies. It was a crazy night. I was with a friend of mine and together we had already watched three films on the trot, all at World Movies. We had no prior plans of action. It just happened that they went on airing the films and we, on our part, went on watching them. So the time Dog Day started, just past three o’ clock, we were thoroughly wonked and conked out and more than ready to plunge ourselves into a long bout of sleep.

The TV was still on and we were having, what we thought, our last round of tea for the night. And then things started happening. Three fairly young lads broke into a small Brooklyn bank, with the intention of looting it. Then even before the whole thing started, one took to his heels. The remaining two stuck on and started doing some very funny things. And we knew we were in for our fourth of the night. Next couple hours, we by turn laughed our hearts out, waxed gloomier as events took some unexpected turns, and eventually melted mellow as the amateur miscreants met their not-too-pleasant fates, entranced all through, by bearing witness to an act of masterful filmmaking, not to mention some very real good acting.

So here it was. A real-life event that took place in the summer of 1972 being turned into a film (the film released in 1975). The event was ripe with all the ingredients of human drama and at the hand of someone less competent, could result in some very bad comedy and maudlin drama. With Lumet, it translated into a cinematic masterpiece.

That is however not to say that Lumet never deviated from the actual details. Only middle marchers are deserving of that kind of bondage. (John Wojtowicz, then in prison, was enraged to find the film vaguely intimating a midway complicity between him and the cops and that he sold off Sal to save his own back. And indeed, after the film was screened at the pen he was staying, he suffered a few attacks from his fellow inmates). Because more than a literal semblance (though that is important, too and Lumet often went to great pains to establish visual affinity of his frames with the published images of the incident.) it is about recognizing those little, curious details that are integral to the story and reveal one or two things about human predicament in general. Like Sal Naturile was 18 years but the man Lumet cast in his role, John Cazale, was 34 at the time the film was made. Yet place their pictures side by side and you can not but notice the strain of sadness stamped in both their faces. It is this sadness that defines Sal Naturile and you could not find any better man than Cazale to portray it.

Time may be our Mahesh Bhatts back home took a leaf out of Lumet’s book.

[For the Life magazine coverage of the real event, visit http://books.google.com/books?id=5VYEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA66&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=1#v=twopage&q=&f=false ]