To march on....

It is a challenge I have taken upon myself to look at my life and the circumstances objectively and as dispassionately as possible. This seemed a reasonable goal for a person who doesn't like to blame circumstance for any of his failures. There is, of course, the flip side that i refuse to attribute any of my successes to circumstance as well. However, I seem to be facing many challenges in the above task recently. For things are rarely as easy as they seem. Now it seems to me that I had created this cushioned air-bag of denial of things that did not affect me. I was never in denial of their existance, just their ability to affect my life in any way. Recently that airbag was ripped apart into insignificance.

It is perhaps a collective ability to renounce our decision making that distinguishes us as a nation. And I shall carry on blaspheming until someone stops. The first knife that plunged into the airbag was a splinter that flew from the Ayodhya verdict. I'd now like you to imagine a guy working in a city 3 hrs away from his grandparents' house. This guy decides to surprise his family by arriving without warning one Thursday night. He books bus tickets a day in advance, books a cab a day in advance, and eagerly awaits the look on his grandparents' faces come Thursday night. The cruel and very-much-expected twist is that the bus is cancelled, the guy catches another bus, and reaches home at an unearthly hour. He is extremely out-of-sorts throughout the journey home, and decides to write about it.

As I write about it, a second knife, or rather bullet, fired from the hand of an andro-humanoid named Chitti ( What a name ) , plunges into the airbag. And there emerged a second, more drastic example of our ability to suspend our reason at the twist of a dark glass and a word, a word which would have been ridiculed into infamy had it come from any other mouth, DOT. It amazes me that the mere name of a protagonist should instantly banish the grey cells from our system. The director is brazen enough to say that the year is 2010. Not even resorting to the cheap excuse that the movie is set in the future. I agree that the man possesses an uncommon charisma and ability to make ordinary things seem extraordinary. This charisma is, however wasted when he is made to seem innately larger-than-life instead of an ordinary man with the attitude of a champion. The scene in which he picks out the impostor from a flock of robots was brilliant, simply because it made no use of the fact that the antagonist was a robot and could make himself into a giant cannon if he wanted to. I frankly did not see much in the movie other than the obvious flaunting of the director's budget and an excuse, a wafer-thin one, to ingest all the stunts that we would have seen anyway. We accept all this by saying that this is all we can expect from a small industry like ours. To those people i would like to point out that we have come up with brilliant art and have a creative brain second to none.

After all this I march on, sad that i will not find a person to ingest my blasphemy and vomit out the taboos that force us to dismantle our mental weapons whenever the conditions demand it. And i march on in the hope that since there is a mountain in sight, a valley must follow, and that I can think, think about the valley and how it could be better. That I can think and rest in those thoughts.

As a parting thought I'd like to say this, a friend once told me that not everything is made for me to think about it. To him I now reply, when you can think about everything, Why not?