That Girl

Labels. Everyone loves them. It’s like giving a giant label maker to a child who goes around stamping everything. Why?

image courtesy - google

We as Indians generalize everything and quickly jump to conclusions and toss the subject aside and move on to more labeling. Maybe the British, Germans, Americans and every goddamn civilization also do this. I wouldn't know, I am Indian. We do it and don’t give it a second thought.

I want to be ‘That Girl’ who has all the labels…yeah, that should be the aim of my life…collect all kinds of labels. Then I can compare them with the others.

Why is it difficult to have an amalgamation of habits, opinions, ideas, perspective in one person? Why should a person be this Hollywood and Bollywood? Why can’t I equally hate both Congress and BJP? Why can’t I lust at Brad Pitt and John Abraham at the same time? Why shouldn't I be a woman and man at work and relationships?

way or that? Why cant one like sweet and sour, rum and whisky (beer should always be out), hot and cold, FB and twitter,

We get so lost in conforming and non-confirming that we tend to lose ourselves. I am a workaholic so I cannot spend my Sundays without checking my mail. Or I am young so have to party. I internalize too much. I am an extrovert. I am too shy. I am like that only. We keep on saying these things and slowly start accepting them as the truth and without knowing we have only added one more label to ourselves.

Have I just labeled myself? Oh I am ‘that label girl’, right. 

GERM OF AN IDEA

As kids, we were all told to stop dreaming and start studying, then when we grew up a bit we were again told to stop dreaming and start slogging at work, then came Christopher Nolan who made a whole 148 min film about how dreaming can be a career option for the new age moviegoer.
I’m not a critic, won’t get into the whole technique, style, content, original or inspired mode… this movie is an original in the sense that it picks up a basic fact that we all know (that dreams can be as real as we want them to be) and added so many layers to it that I’d doubt if anybody in the audience could not relate to it.
Yes, like the matrix it went into an alternate reality where one can feel pain (since pain is in the mind and it is the mind which dreams) but the depiction of the whole realm of reality was a masterpiece.
Movies like Inception, Matrix, A Clockwork Orange and No Smoking which question the basic premise of our existence and throw up new ways in how we have perceived reality are always on my Top 10 list
How many time have we dreamt that we win that inter school sprint to impress the new English teacher or flew to office to be on time for that important presentation or have that witty comeback to the hot guy at the bar….weren’t we all heroes in our own dreams playing out in the labyrinth of our minds like a cinemascope Bollywood feature.
In fact I wrote this post immediately after I saw the movie …on my way back home, I whipped up my Mac book and while I was typing, the words literally flew from my fingertips and arranged themselves on the screen, I also detected a faint whiff of smoke when the typing was happening faster than the speed of light. The sidewalks had shed their shabby, muddy and desolate look and wore a happy Grecian architecture with fancy cars zooming past me. The cat atop of the tallest building noticed my typing and was impressed; she let out a faint meow. Exactly 10 sec after uploading this post, I got 19,275,499 hits on my blog and approximately 9,495, 142 calls from various film critics asking if they can use my post as their review. Then the auto reached by humble studio apartment and I got the ‘kick’ in the form of the revised night fare.
Somehow, I wasn’t sure whether I ‘had’ seen the movie or dreamt it all up! But I do remember paying for the tickets!

Labour Pains!

Ever wondered about the mysteries of life and death and how various cultures deal with it. Some cultures celebrate death and give the departed soul the best party ever. Others are thoughtful enough to pack all the essential items with the corpse for their last journey. For the wondrous moment of new life, people donate their fortune to the less fortunate ones, some light up the newborn’s life with Cigars; others do elaborate rituals to please their Gods.
Such various customs and culture specific rituals must have been duly noticed and noted down by some anthropologist for their research/thesis work which the common junta ignores generally ignores… imagine reading about such useless info when the antics of our cricketers, movie stars and wannabe reality stars are much more juicer…but I digress.
If someone is an avid Bollywood fan and has grown up in the eighties where Bollywood followed the tried and tested formula of revenge, then they might have inkling to the ambiguous meandering of my mind. Sample this…
The father has been killed (or confined) by the bad guys and the wife who somehow escapes from the den of the bad guys and runs away not because she can’t bear the torture (or lecherous stares of the extras) but she has to give birth to the hero of the film so that he can avenge the family and have a happy ending. Regular fare…some even went on to become hits …but that one scene…where the hero is actually born….it’s supposed to be a very dramatic one… and is often depicted as dark… with rain and thunderstorm and the wails of the pregnant mother who thrashes about so much that the art director must have a standby set ready just in case. The ‘mother’ is drenched in sweat and tears roll down her eyes and the scene seems so long that you automatically start praying for the baby to come out so that the movie can go on…
But why do our filmmakers depict childbirth in such morbid and melancholy way… why is the beginning of child birth always associated with the mother wishing that she was a monk?
In comparison, American film and TV (which is so cool…not to be ignored) rarely projects child birth in such dejected and macabre way unless the plot requires it. It will then be an exception, not the norm.
Is it something to do with the healthcare policies of both the nations… one is developed where all its citizens have basic rights to medical facilities and do not view the process of childbirth as that big a deal, while the other is still struggling to provide basic facilities for the expectant mother. Girls grow up dreading the process of childbirth and with convoluted theories of sex … Agreed schools nowadays have sex education, but imagine how many years of viewing the agony of childbirth in popular cinema is etched in a girls mind….can a textbook with 100 marks of test marks erase that imagery from the easily impressionable mind?
For a nation with more than a billion headcount…that’s a lot of labour pain.