Mandela : Long Walk to Freedom

To idealise someone is to dehumanise them. And one of the most pertinent functions of a biographer is to humanise the legend that maybe raised to the pedestal of apotheosis, holding up the veil of preternatural perfection to show the conspicuous imperfections :fallacies, delusions, depravity lying within.

Hence that is what William Nicholson should have strived for, to audaciously portray Nelson Mandela as he is, rather than through the prism of subjective veneration almost to the point of worship. However  in some parts William Nicholson has succeeded to do so, but in most parts he has miserably failed. The movie looks like a perennial monologue. An obstinate chronology of events. It looks like a melodramatic documentary.

A biographer's function is to display a person's life in confluence with the time and place. William Nicholson's movie appears to be an apocryphal tale with ineffable stoicism of the the main protagonist. He has concentrated more on the innocuous, superficial details that obviously needs to be co-opted in the movie but need not be the epicenter of the movie. The bedrock of the movie flagrantly had to be the abysmal poverty and benighted ignorance of the Blacks due to the profane , abominable apartheid that ruffled the egalitarian Mandela, it had to be the unfathomable journey of Mandela to Madiba. But that appears in the movie to be just an impetuous quirk of destiny. Throughout the movie, Nelson Mandela appears to be obtrusive, with impregnable confidence, precluding any battle that rages within oneself precipitated by ambivalent perceptions, puzzling conundrums and nonplussed dilemmas that characterises such an iconoclast's life. It appears that he is fighting for the rights of blacks, but it's grossly missing what rights he is actually fighting for. The only feature of the movie is the impassioned, demagoguery speeches of Nelson Mandela arousing his brethren's passions and emotions to fight for their rights. Sometimes he appears to be a mere rabble-rouser. Also after his initial reluctance to join ANC, it's is ambiguous as to what actually stirred Mandela to join ANC. And in the next scene, he is the inevitable, infallible head of the ANC, the bellwether of the rights of Blacks in South Africa. He is the cynosure of all eyes. Also when Nelson Mandela is jailed, the jailor appears to be barbaric, vile, there are rambunctious voices that are heard surrounding the precincts of the jail. But the jailor seemed to conduct no atrocities on the Black prisoners. They seemed to live in peace for a seemingly perpetual time. 

However, the movie had tried to incorporate every intricate detail, however inconsequential it may be. The actors have given scintillating performance with their mellifluous African accent. But the movie has just trespassed a lot of pertinent details and anecdotes that has made the man what he was. It breaks a lot of reasonable paradigms of Nelson Mandela and sows the seeds of doubt whether Mandela truly deserves the reverence and veneration he is endowed with. Instead of dehumanising the man, it has actually demonise the man in some parts.

It leaves the viewer nonplussed as to why he is considered an immortal legend, why he is assumed to be residing in the empyrean that is already providing shelter to Gandhi, Einstein?. 

At the end of the movie, you are not inspired by the man or his life but you are just left with some details stripped off its intent, pertinence and more important a soul.

The movie has been adapted from the book by the same name and it has just committed the same, trite mistake just like Great Gatsby or any such movie. It has too fervently and explicitly followed the book and has been oblivious to the difference of a content of a book and a movie, leaving the objective of the movie in obscurity.

In the end, I will give 3 stars for the impeccable acting of the actors and the soulful music of the movie.

"A Casual Vacancy" by J.K Rowling

To be honest to you, I have not read any of J.K Rowling's books. Because when the avalanche of Harry Potter books engulfed young readers world over in a blanket of sorcery and magic, I never turned a page of a book unless it needed to be crammed up for a deceptively pertinent exam.

So when I picked up A Casual Vacancy, I didn't burden the writer with any unreasonable or unjustifiable expectations.

For Harry Potter readers and J.K Rowling fans, if you are expecting a crime thriller and while reading the book, strive to join the disjointed events, unconnected dots you would be utterly nonplussed and disappointed. If you are expecting a book soaked in magic and sorcery where things, people undergo an alchemical metamorphosis, you would be uncompromisingly disillusioned. If you are expecting a book, which will catapult you in a distant idyllic future where you obtusely perceive yourself to be romancing with a voluptuous woman of your chimeric fantasises, in that case your romantic fancies would be unmercifully pummelled. This book is a novel which would nonchalantly promise you in the beginning political melodrama, a political thriller that will give you goose-bumps as you proceed, but then again you would be disenchanted. 

This book initiates with the accidental death of Barry Fairbrother, a Parish Councillor of an idyllic town Pagford and the events precipitated by this ghastly, unfortunate incident, who is the bellwether of a cause very integral to the politics of Pagford. In the process, it strips off the unblemished masquerade of love, friendship, unity , loyalty which maybe conjectured and prejudiced due to the untainted, idyllic, unruffled exterior of Pagford; to reveal the scars and pockmarks of betrayal, politics, hatred , licentiousness within. It shows a town where children denigrate their parents, where the growing of children is a constant bereavement for their parents, where the thorns of adultery pricked the bouquet of marriage understood to be held together by love and honesty, where children are sailing in the turbulent waters of confusion, lasciviousness and depravity.

The book overwhelms the stereotype of J.K Rowling as a mere story-teller, she has proven with her mellifluous and intricate writing that she is a virtuoso in the art of writing. The main feature of this book is that it does't have any quintessential protagonist. It is a book where a lot of stories are intertwined together to form a thick braid of a manifested reality that we encounter in our daily lives but seem oblivious to it. The subtleties, intricacies and nitty-gritties of every character is impeccably explained. The unfathomable, complex relationship between characters are flawlessly explained which has the bittersweet spices of love, adultery, betrayal, honesty, belongingness, envy to form a khichdi, a labyrinthe of a world that we found ourselves in. None of the characters in this book is black and white but it has its kaleidoscopic shades of grey. The book clearly portrays the stupefying simplicity as well as the incurable clot of complexities and it's inevitable repurcussions on the circumstances surrounding them. It shows that J.K Rowling truly understands human behaviour.

However the book towards its end looks like an outstretched elastic band released abrubtly to contract at a preternatural speed to an asymmetrical ,anomalous shape. It looks as if J.K Rowling was overwhelmed and fatigued due to the monotony of writing and one day decided to bring an impetuous halt to the disjointed as well as interspersed events. It looks like a threadbare cloth was immediately parched with obnoxious, unmatchable threads. The end also looks too predictable, it looks like a philistine, obtuse Bollywood Masala film in the end.

In short, 4 stars for the immaculate writing 1star stripped off due to the impulsive close to the story.

Why you should write......

A human being is always assailed with an avalanche of thoughts, ideas, opinions and perceptions. Often psychologists says we should accept all negative and positive thoughts as they are, we have to fully accept and embrace but we should not act upon it, or get peeved or petulant about it. But sometimes it is very implausible particularly if you are a person whose mind is like a factory manufacturing thoughts relentlessly without any assessment of quality, thereby creating more inventory which obstinately occupies every available space, forfending the installation of any new machinery due to restraint of space for further development. Its like not rubbing an irrepressible itch on your stomach. It's an irony that we need to empty our bucket-minds of the mud of thoughts, prejudices and preconceived notions in order to pour the clean water of wisdom. But these undulating frenemies needs an outlet, and writing is the ideal outlet.

Sometimes we want to share our inner torment, frustration, confusion caused by the infighting, altercations of our own ideas, opinions but there is always the perennial danger of being judged by the person with whom we share. As it is an home truth, that people judge irrespective of their intellectual refinement or acumen. Sometimes certain anecdotes in our lives wraps themselves as an albatross around our necks compelling us to share the beautiful lessons that have inevitably risen from our self-conceived mistakes like a lotus that can only grow out of mud, thereby precluding others to commit the same mistakes. Sometimes a person receives nirvana, attains the stage of self-actualisation and wants his family, brethren to know about his life, about his exemplary successes and embarrassing failures, his periods of utter despondency and exultation, and more particularly about his indefatigable endeavor to seek the purpose of his life that appeared to be perpetually elusive until it was glaringly flagrant to him. Writing is must for anyone who has something to be shared. And we all have something to share, the reason is we can't share verbally as the black flies of of being judged, prejudiced or also being ostracized, abhorred keep on buzzing around us. Sometimes we are not given the time or the space or the audience to share. Sometimes, it merely happens that it becomes quite implausible for us to communicate our uncommunicable experiences with the acute shortage of words available to us at the moment we want to share. Sometimes we are afraid we will hurt someone's sensitivities, egos ,we will give rise to an unnecessary argument or altercation that may decimate our relationships. Human beings have this idiosyncrasy of being obtrusive, superimposing their views, opinions without lending their ears to the person who has actually initiated the talking. But a piece of paper will provide you ample time, space for you to cleanse your mind off the debris it is carrying of the perpetual war of ideas, opinions that has been going on subconsciously in your mind. It will not judge you irrespective of the degree of vileness of what you share. It will provide you the time to rummage through words that can aid you to acutely describe your colourful, complicated emotions and experiences, etc. The piece of paper wouldn't ask you anything in return for the insurmountable favour  it is offering you. Your secrets won't be fished out for a bargain because it doesn't have an iota of greed.

A reader will know that most of the legendary and classical writers have often published their autobiographical novels. Now why an autobiographical "Novel" , an autobiographical novel helps you to share the little intricacies and details of your life, at the same time guarding against any distortion or stalement of memory due to the perishable attribute of time. It leaves it to the imagination of the reader to draw its own conclusions.

Sometimes we are nonplussed about are problems, we find ourselves in dilemmas, conundrums, most of the time putting the problems on paper gives you a concrete understanding of the problem. It gives you a clearer, top of the view picture of the labyrinth you find yourself in which inevitably helps you to devise solutions and find a way out of the maize. Actually even writing down the solution forfeits the mind from overthinking, thereby precluding a wrecking ball of chaos and confusion to destroy the impregnable monument of solution.

Sometimes, we have certain feelings, tendencies, idiosyncrasies residing within us as a result of an unfortunate past incident or an encounter that like a leech slowly and inconspicuously sucks the joy from our lives. Writing may enable to dig up and excavate the layers of the past heaped and covered under our obscure memories. This help us to be a mere observer or a spectator of those feelings and tendencies which with time recedes until it is encaptured into nothingness. 

Hence, write because you want to be empty, joyous and because there is a world out there who is waiting to listen to your ideas, your little bitter-sweet stories.

American Hustle!!!!!

American Hustle, sometimes certain movies requires an impeccable performance from its actors to portray the characters to which the plot of the story is irrevocably weaved into. If the actors fail to convey such characters which are not black and white, but has its shades of grey, then the film is rendered to be an inexplicable chaos with completely no concrete foundation. But paradoxically, though it requires actors of exceptional calibre and aptitude who are unrelenting in their efforts to communicate the characters they are portraying, they are merely a mound of mud anticipating to be alchemically metamorphosed into an utility pot by the blessed hands of the potter i.e the director. Hence such films requires completely integrated, incorrigibly focused team effort, as here neither the actor nor the director can completely carry the prodigious film on their emaciated shoulders.

Now American Hustle has Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper in the lead. The name "Christian Bale" injects into your mind a lot of unreasonable expectations. But this time around even though being the main actor he doesn't take an indomitable centre-stage in the movie leaving everybody into oblivion, rather he gives a performance that can be regarded as unobtrusive, evanescent, subtly playing the nuances of his character without demanding undue attention. His performance is not something that is conspicuous in its appeal for a heart-rending applause. That is the hallmark of his performance that he doesn't implore to be noticed, at the same time, he has again displayed he is a virtuoso, a connoisseur at what he does. Christian Bale plays a con-artist compelled by a fame-feverish FBI agent, who ostentatiously and deceptively showcases an albatross around his neck compelling him to bring the delinquent, corrupt, ignoble under book. Amy Adams plays the accomplice and love of the con-artist and later plays the bellwether along with Christian Bale to conceive and implement a treacherous plan to shop out the vileness mentioned above. But in his incorrigible desire for fame, the F.B.I agent is after a Mayor, a politician who is doing the wrong thing for the right reasons after vainly experimenting all the options in the past. Jennifer Lawrence is the apple of the eye. She plays an erratic and impetuous wife who forcibly spawns kaleidoscopic emotions in the viewer like pity, abhorrence, innocence, she can stir up a raucous laughter in you or can release the rain deposited, concocted in the clouds of your eyes. She is mysterious according to her con-artist husband and she plays truly so from the word go. In the end, she will leave you with your mouth hanging in awe. If she doesn't win an Oscar, a lot of people would be chagrined and disappointed. There are many incidents like her reaction to the blast of the microwave, her reason to not give the relief of divorce to her con-artist husband, the very anecdotes of her eccentricities at parties that can just give you an ache in the stomach domineered by laughter. Bradley Cooper performs his role to the finesse, he plays this impassionate, mutinous FBI agent who is over ambitious and over zealous and had been envisaging plans that may catapult him to the echelons of the agency skipping many levels on the way and bring him infallible fame. The movie is must see for the movie aficionados. The direction tackles with the intricacies, nitty-gritties of every character. For not an instance, the movie seems to be dragged. Though one may feel, that there are unwanted digressions, frivolous events, incidents, but those just explains the characters in detail and their subsequent relevance and inevitability to the Hustle of the story.

Hence the movie is not dragged I think, but intricately explained.

State of Women, a cause of divorces??

Let us look at the state of woman in India. India is predominantly a patriarchal society where Indian woman plays merely a second fiddle to her  husband, burying her dreams and ambitions irrevocably and surrendering herself to the tyranny of hackneyed and monotonous household work. She is endowed with the multitudinous responsibilities of household work including child rearing, by the obstinate and incorrigible prejudices and the dogmas of her family which is just an accomplice of the actual miscreant, the society. She cannot offload some of her duties to her egoistic husband who would feel the work below his well-preserved dignity. She is obsequious and servile to the whims and demands of her husband, who in most cases, is raised to the level of apotheosis. She is pusillanimous and timid to the impotent rage, fury and at times sexual abuse committed by him.  Let us look at the statistics, according to Renuka Chaudhary, Minister of women and children, 70% of women in India are victims of domestic violence. She is confined to the unyielding four walls of her house-prison. As she is the carrier of prestige and honour of her philistine family, she is not allowed to work outdoors as she may fall prey to the lecherous and ogling eyes of testosterone-high stranger men. In many cases, she is considered to be a factory manufacturing babies without any relief of bottlenecks. She is the perennial unpaid servant of the family subjected to chagrin, torment and abuse of her masters who may also have bought her by making the payment in dowry. And when slaves clamour for justice, they are considered a mutiny and they are oppressed and suppressed by these undulating societal forces. So to think, that women in India may shop out their men for their concealed felonies by filing cases in our courts which are under constant hibernation, when they are still under the thraldom of men is to think too far-fetched.

Let us look at the West. Men and women enjoy equal rights. There is 99% literacy. It means there is awareness and they have the educational weapons to earn their own living and are not compelled to implore for money from their husbands to fulfill their needs . With education and monetary cushion comes a level of self-respect and when that self-respect is constantly damaged and thwarted, women may act in defiance against their husbands by filing a suit or vice-versa. With education, money; freedom inevitably follows. And many men and women may misuse this well-attained freedom by committing adultery, infidelity, betrayal, philandering, etc. in India too, men ( in some cases women too) are familiar with all those vices, but then the voices of women are muted and crushed under the dilapidated building of prestige and honour. Also they are surrounded with the perennial fear of being penniless, impoverished and being ostracized by the society exacerbated by the fact that they are congenitally destined to be stripped off any educational weapons which may aid them to earn their living independently. 

So she endures and submits to the autocracy of these unjust facts till her hair turns grey and when finally she earns the relief of death. What if the women commits adultery, she is insolently kicked like a ball out of the stadium by his husband footballer.

Also, with development, comes the satanic greed which leads to insatiable desires. This ultimately leads to elevating work, career to the pinnacle of priorities, leaving family and a life of giving into oblivion. This is the reason why the imbalance of personal and professional life leads to divorces in the West. At times this imbalance leads to stress and an elusiveness of one's purpose and meaning cloaked by frustration that is released like a lava from a volcano onto the entire family.

Hence, all is not good in West, but still there is independence, an air of individuality. All though the condition of women is changing particularly in the metro cities of India. This revolution has still not creep into the crevices of those tiny villages where India truly resides. And whether the mind of the man has changed is still debatable.

Of Human Bondage by William. Somerset. Maugham

500 pages...not yet completed the book,2.05 am and I'ii just add one more facetious detail, I have not slept yesterday at all, please no exaggeration, and the day before yesterday my sleep was just like the sleep of a mother who has to attend  an impetuous new born child every now and then .So you can safely presume that there is an avalanche of thoughts, ideas in my mind  with the fiendish desire, now being fulfilled beyond measure, to create ruptures in my  heavenly sleep. Now there is also an irony, though I am distressed that it has considerably affected my efficiency at work which I flagrantly abhor, notwithstanding the sordid state of my mind due to inadequate sleep, I have been seized by a bolt of exultation and incomprehensible happiness. This book dirties it's pages with every aspect of life. Inextricable confusion, lamentable naïveté, inexplicable complexities, truths arrived by gut, untruths by a legitimate experience, befuddling philosophies all condensed into 500 pages which we call life. Up till now the books I have read, I am sure the editor would have replaced a word like talkative with loquacious, middle class with bourgeois to provide an apparently pedestrian English an air of grandiose. And it deceptively provides the writer a tunkard of individuality. But here I found a writer whose writing has come seamlessly, effortlessly. He is a writer who knows the subtle difference between contentment and satisfaction. He has written the book in lucid, plain English and he has only used seemingly difficult words to my embarrassingly limited knowledge of this funny language when the need arisen. I always felt a good book is which helps the reader to articulate the obscure meanings of the spirit. A good book is a book which turns an anecdote or a seemingly frivolous situation into an event crowded with battles of idiosyncrasies, which uncovers the prejudices concealed within the obscenity of small talk, which provides indisputable evidence whether a man has been obsequious to past circumstances or conditioning or has he been the one who has carried his fate in his clenched fists or has been ironically both which is often the case, I want to conclude with etc. By my definition of good book, this is surely a classic whose writing is a piece of art or an irresistible delicacy that needs to be tasted, chewed and devoured. I have not read the book once or twice but thrice because the writing was detailed, impressive, splendid, wondrous and a word that I have never used for other books mystical. A famous artist said" god is in the details" and this book justifies that even without any attempt to justify it. 

Now it has been long that I have completed the book and I have been completely mesmerised by the book, its elegant, wondrous writing. It is an autobiographical novel. Every time I read this book I discover something new and peeved at myself that how did I miss it. It is about Philip Carey adopted as a child by a fanatical Christian family. His pedantic mind overemphasises the minor details and adheres fanatically to biblical knowledge accompanying an outrageous violation to common sense which finally throws him into a typhoon of disillusionment. This compels him to pose some ominous intimidating questions to long held beliefs, dogmas and he finally extricates himself from religious chauvinism, which, made him conceive a dream to be a vicar. This disillusionment, escape makes him reconsiders his decisions and goals and then actually the story starts with his frustration, chagrin, his indefatigable endeavour to find the purpose of his life, that makes him travel through Germany, France and back to London, his little encounters with man of letters, connoisseurs, aficionados, people tangled in a web of contradicting ideas, opinions and as a result becoming habituated to intellectual masturbation, his irrevocable, irresistible, inextricable platonic love for a philistine woman, and finally the ocean of unconditional love he falls into with another woman ,all these heaped on each other forming a pyramid reaching to a vertex when he finally uncovers the meaning of life.

If there is a list of books you have to read before you die, this will surely figure in the top ten.

The perennial war between Gen X and Gen Y: Generation Gap or something more than that

My nephew Vineet is impassioned about music. He wants to pursue a career in music. Obviously he is conspicuously aware about the different branches and twigs in music. And he is very clear which branch of music he wants to pluck and savour the taste of its fruits.

But with this particular decision, he became an iconoclast and tittering at the edge of being ostracised from our business oriented, money feverish society. I didn't want to be pusillanimous and bow down to this prodigious, portentous majority. So I advised him to decipher the obscure, vague yearnings of his heart and then not to betray it and then take an infallible stand so that he is not disgorged by forces embroiled in prejudices, dogmas, preconceived notions and anachronous beliefs.

After a long, impassioned discussion I deduced from the discussions and acute observations that he is under the thraldom of music. He has also dabbled precociously in some aspects of music and created his own music. 

But it is very flagrant that he will suffer flak not only from his own logical, pragmatic and rational mind but also his immediate, extended and interminable family which would want him to strive for a secured life by taking the conventional, tried and tested, traceable route of earning a degree, landing a job in some heavy-weight, multinational company and to pursue music has a hobby not a career in defiance of the quote "Make your hobby a career". 

This is not an isolated event or a mere anecdote that one can ignore. It is the unveiling of a perennial war between the so called Gen X and Gen Y. We have talked a lot about generation gap. But let us look at the other reasons.

Expectations

When we are born, we don't arrive with our mere microcosmic body and our macrocosmic soul but we arrive with a weight of unreasonable, unfair expectations that assails us relentlessly when we enter the hellish cavern of adolescence, the age when we are blamed for instability, indecisiveness, the age where we are impelled to explore through the crevices of the fortress of prejudices, dogmas, atavistic prides, superimposed nepotisms to find the unalterable truth precipitated by our insatiable urge to find the meaning of life, the age when confusion is an unwavering companion and clarity is always elusive. Obviously this is not applicable to the majority, this is applicable to the misfits, non-conformists. Applicable to people who are courageous enough not to conform to the society's obstinate standards but who are wise enough to listen to the subtle yearnings of the conscience, soul. When these misfits enter the age of adolescence, they unconsciously undertake an abortion of their parents expectations. This leads to a Cold War between the parents and their children whose growing becomes a constant bereavement exacerbated by the apparitions and ghosts of their tiny versions when everything was merrier and sanguine. Everyone stays in the same house (particularly in Eastern civilisation) but there emerges a relationship equivalent to a relationship between a landlord and a paying guest where the communications are superficial, formal and sporadic. Where roles are performed, duties are carried out perfunctorily and not with an iota of emotion which distinguishes us from inanimate objects.

Prejudices

Conveying to philistine particularly middle class parents that you want to pursue a career in music, acting, writing is considered unarguably blasphemous, akin, to a demolition of a temple. As such jobs are not considered to be adequately remunerative particularly if luck acts truant and most importantly such jobs, careers are considered to be ignoble, vile particularly characterised with smack, philandering, alcoholism. In short a satanic life. Whereas engineers, chartered accountants are revered ,placed on a varnished high pedestal almost to the ludicrous point of apotheosis. I recommend them to watch "The Wolf Of Wall Street".Now instead of using such flowering language, I will use just one word "PREJUDICE".

Holding on

I am sorry such a naive heading but this an uncommunicable irony. Like the way parents in Western countries leave their sons around the age of 18 to fight on their own for their very survival. Indian parents mostly hold on to their sons advising, imploring them till the very ends of their lives. Their interference seems interminable constantly adding on their obnoxious spices in the frothy soups of their sons lives. Every Indian parent wants to see their sons " SETTLED DOWN". And this concept of settling down is so vague, obscure and so utterly subjective that the children are hemmed in the box of the brougham carriages driven by the old wobbly hands of their parents till their very end, or till they are  wearied down incapable of holding the reins anymore. Settling down means having a beautiful wife, adequate cash bells ringing in the bank accounts and a decent, dignified business or job and a sound mind devoid of any illicit fetishes or lascivious demands and etcetera. Etcetera this is what keeps the parents holding on to their children till their very wind pipes are crushed and their larynx is choked off. Surrendering or letting go seems an alien concept to Indian Middle class parents. 

I hope against hope that my nephew Vineet pursue a career in music but the storm of whatever we mentioned above is so violent, tenacious that it can dislodge a tree from its long winding, deepened roots. But I would always tell him like I always tell myself in the face of these unfathomable forces "The one thing that doesn't abide by a majority rule is a person's conscience".