Rediscovering beauty

Gentle, provocative and emotional. Very rarely do we get to use these words together for movies nowadays, but Memories of March was one such piece of art, sure to stay in my mind, and heart, for a long time. Particularly due to Deepti Naval’s performance as a mother who’s suddenly bereaved and goes to her son’s home & city and discovers that he’s gay…the layers and nuances of the performance left me breathless and emotional.

This is yet another part of my current mood of wistful reflection…and all books, movies, songs appear to complement each other and heighten the feeling. Or maybe it’s the reverse.

Antaheen… a muted drama about love and loneliness and loss. It had been a long time since I had seen a movie of that nature…and Barfi doesn’t count because it was a great entertainer. This one wasn’t…it was a simple offering. And I liked it.

A couple of songs from Agneepath that became my favorites recently.  O Saiyaan is this plaintive cry of someone who’s madly in love and is also conscious of the pain and loss that awaits her. Abhi mujh mein kahin speaks of the discovery of humanity within the self…the stirrings of emotion that tell us we are alive

Which led me to relisten to older songs that are perfect companions to my driving…Tanha dil…Justuju jiski thi…Yaara seeli seeli…Rubaru…Ajeeb dastan hai yeh…Waqt ne kiya. I love driving as I listen to these songs…the cacophony of the world retreats into a background blur and while my instincts keep me driving, the eyes of my mind are somewhere else as I absorb the lyrics and the voices.

Books too…Colm Toibin and his examination of the lonely life of the immigrant is so dispassionate yet so detailed that I have no option but to get completely wrapped up in their lives. And Alexander McCall Smith’s sweet and gentle stories of the lady detective in Botswana helps me remember the fundamental values and principles we cherish…or need to cherish.

And so these days pass…as the year comes to an end, and frenetic activity combined with irritation and frustration characterizes my days, a part of me has detached itself and is spending time rediscovering some depths which I had forgotten existed.

The diatribe of a very messed up person, pun intended

In one sudden moment, to be repeated several times over, all that thought and emotion and reflection and introspection merge with the remains of the oil and the spice and the salt and the flour and find their way out of my body. Eyes streaming with the water of guilt, head throbbing with the pound of adrenalin, I survey the world around with in a gaze of curiosity triggered by unabashed self absorption. I dig deeper and deeper into myself, questioning every single decision I have ever taken in my thirty four years of existence. Each spoonful of sugar that added to the waistline, each utterance that left a heart broken, each act of conspicuous consumption that burdened my wardrobe, each penny I contributed to the temples of gluttony, each instance I missed to make someone's life better, each speck of dust I left untouched - let all the sins be accounted for! Let them all stand in line and confront me with my own baseness, so I may touch the ground with my head and beg for understanding, wait for that light to shine from above that reveals the complicated machinery that is driving this destruction. But I beg in vain, I wait in vain. Because there is no light. There is only darkness, where all the sugar and the spice go and wait for their companions to join them. As this darkness grows and envelops all, I notice how the walls don't look so white any more, how the red of the curtain appears to have faded into a duller hue that reveals as much as it hides, how the smiles look forced and how the eyes are actually shut all the while they are open. Am I surrounded by blindness? Is this some sort of fantastical existence where all the light has been merely my desire to run away from the darkness. And when finally the moments of truth, as they are so passionately evoked by the authors who write books of a thousand pages, do finally arrive, do I realize that this light is as worthless and as transient as the shimmer of the diamonds in the sky on Diwali night, creating an illusion of light and magic that only the very stupid or the very blind would believe to replace the reality of the darkness? There's that boy planning the first threesome of his life, anticipating the excitement of love (!) at both ends. There's that woman systematically planning the impulsive, emotional arguments that will slowly drive her loved (!) son to the destination that she firmly believes he needs to reach. There's that girl who has finally arrived at the answer to the critical question of life "what do you love (!) to do?" and is now going to make a "go for it", in the language of the self-help books she read recently. What madness! What blindness! Or are they the ones who see the darkness and accept it, evolving with it so their eyes can see in the dark, and help them to hunt, and eat, and survive, and grow stronger? While there are us...the idiots who bump their knees, their elbows, their ankles...anything that evokes the howls of pain...and then attribute the pain to the process of "growing up" and "learning about life" and, like Calvin's dad, "building character"? Well , there's my character now, a pile of pastel colors on the floor, the regurgitated remains of my inner blind self, raising a stink that can unblock the most stubborn of noses, supreme even in its messiest avatar. 

Perking me up

When I say books are my best friend and the anchor of my life, that's really true in every sense and not merely a symbolic statement. And as it is with all such anchors, they have the ability to influence not just my mood from day to day, but my entire outlook and mindset for a much longer period of time. Recently, the discovery of Ravan and Eddie gave me a high that I haven't felt for quite a while...the joyous rambunctiousness of the writing took me by surprise and I wasted no time in getting the sequel which got released just a few weeks ago. Two weeks of very happy reading!

And even my second love - movies - gave me cause for celebration. Four good movies within a few weeks of each other - Barfi, English Vinglish, Premium Rush, Argo - was truly like gorging on chocolates and ice cream for several days in a row! The icing was of course the successful resurgence of my all time favorite actress, Sri...which sparked off many fun conversations with fellow admirers and some detractors too.

Then, out of the blue, I made a new friend, R (or Minty Mystic as I like to call him). Eerily identical tastes in some areas (Sri, Hitchcock, Lamhe etc) and yet a vastly different personality converged to 3 extremely pleasant evenings within just one week. Not sure if this will continue or build further but for now, it's always nice to make a new connection and discover new worlds through others.

So the last few weeks, despite the worries and the heartbreaks and the boredom, turned out pretty well. Today I was trying to search for a poem and started to trawl through the thousands of mails I had exchanged with V to find it. It was like reading through old letters from another life. They made me pause and wonder at the magic. A good reminder of why I am still on that rollercoaster. I do like the highs, even as I survive the lows.