Love/Hate

I've heard somewhere that Naseeruddin Shah and Kevin Bacon never watch their own movies; similarly, Ian Botham never went to nets for practice or say, Neil Diamond never used to rehearse before any performance. However, I am incidentally not a genius of their stature; so I need to revisit every work of mine more than once so as to learn more about the things which I did and even those things which I didn't. That revisiting not only helps in improvisation but also provides me with a few topics, sometime. For example, while revisiting my last post, I stumbled across this love-hate thing and decided to think more about it and scribble something.

Well I consider love and hate to be very close to each other; particularly when they tend to become extreme. That may sounds pretty surprising to many people but I think it's just like head/tail or north/south or black/white relationship. If you've one of them, then other would also be there accompanying the first one. However, there is another facet of this relationship, stressed upon by the preachers of love; which is that 'If you find yourself hating someone you thought you loved, then I would have to question whether you really felt love at all.' It is very easy to mistake need for love. Real love just loves, freely, without expectation. If that love is rejected, you may feel sad, but if hate is your response to rejection it indicates a feeling of entitlement & expectations.

Many times hate is a covering emotion, it covers other hurt feelings that are just too painful to bear. It is interesting to note that our desire for exclusivity arises in romantic love but not in hate. On the contrary, in hate we want to see our negative attitude shared by others. It seems natural that we want to share our negative fortune with others while wanting to keep the positive part merely to ourselves. In positive emotions, when we are happy, we are more open to being attentive to other people, but we guard the source of our happiness more.

Many testimonies, as well as fictional works, describe situations in which people find themselves hating the person they love. This might initially appear to be contradiction, for how one can love and hate the same person at the same time. A discussion of this problem requires making a distinction between logical consistency and psychological compatibility. Hating the one you love may be a consistent experience, but it raises difficulties concerning its psychological compatibility.

Love and hate are often described to be diametrically opposed; in this case, it is impossible to speak about hating the one we love without engaging in a logical contradiction. Two major arguments can be raised against this description. First, love is broader in scope than is hate, as it refers to more features of the object. Thus, while in hate the object is considered to be basically a bad agent, in romantic love the object is perceived to be both good and attractive. Second, there are many varieties of each emotion (and there are more kinds of love than of hate), and each kind cannot be the exact opposite of all other kinds of the other emotion.

Besides, there is an even more interesting point of view in which people claim that one hates because one loved. To illustrate, they mean that basically you hate someone whom you really wish to love, but whom you cannot love. Perhaps because you love him so much that you are unable to deject yourself even when the love is not been reciprocated, or maybe he himself prevents you or for some other reason. That way, hate is thus a disguised form of love.

What I feel is that if you bother to hate someone, you care enough about them to give them a great deal of "room" in your head. If you love them you do the same. I think indifference should be considered the opposite of love, in fact even of hate. Indifference is the strongest force in the universe. It makes everything it touches meaningless; love and hate don't stand a chance against it.

Delhi 6

So, here comes yet another blog post of mine related to Bollywood (Hindi film industry, for the people who hate this otherwise very popular term). Well, I have been an ardent follower of Bollywood and those who know me very well, can vouch for the fact. Besides, I've been a regular in the first-day movie-watcher list of cinema halls. Consider my apologies in advance for being too generic; but what I believe is, any guy who has not watched any Hindi Film or has not ever played cricket has actually not lived in India. I've deliberately used the term "guy" and not "person" precisely because it is well known fact that most of the girls simply HATE cricket J

Anyways, this post is supposed to be about Delhi-6 so let me come to the main point. I watched the film, as obvious, on Friday but waited for this post till today so as to give the chance to you all to watch the film on last weekend before any spoiler from my side at least. Now, it's quite some time and I think I can go on with expressing my opinion about the film. To state in one line: "I loved the film"

The whole plot revolves around proceedings in Delhi and has typical Indian day-to-day life as its backdrop and I should say that the filmmaker has done full justice with both the walled city and our lifestyle. Still, many people might not have liked the picture, as evident from one of my friend's status message which reads like "Ban Delhi 6 | The Director himself is Kala Bandar" but I liked it a lot; I liked it for its cinematography, for the art direction, for the amazing individual performances by powerhouse actors, for its screenplay, for its music, for its metaphors, and most importantly, for the soul of the film.

I don't know about others, but I could relate a lot to it. For those who have lived in Delhi, or Jodhpur, or many such cities could have easily related to things like jalebi-wallah or nukkad-talks or the tulsi plant or patangbazi or the Ramlila and the extent to which they are embedded in our lives. But all this was related to just content; I found the effort exemplary even in context of treatment. The metaphors like the person holding the mirror, the "dil gira dafatan" song, etc. run throughout the picture and made this clichéd story a worth-watching experience. Take for an example, the whole Ram Lila sequence where events like Sita Haran, or Shabri-ber, or Lanka Yuddh happening in accordance with the real-time happenings in the area. Metaphors have not been very common thing amongst Indian filmmakers unlike the western filmmaking style; there have been though a few exceptions in say Vijay Anand's or Guru Datt's works. These things definitely add a lot of beauty to the picture and like Rang De Basanti, this time also Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra hits a home run in this regard. I guess, now I've praised Delhi-6 more than required so I should shut up; but I would beg your pardon to praise just one more area and that is acting performances; everyone simply brilliant.

Let me sign off by highlighting one more aspect. The other day, I was reading Big B's blog and found him sort-of ridiculing critics for the huge difference in their reviews. Well, I would say that difference in two opinion is definitely possible; and somebody may like a work very much or just hate it big time (like recently in case of public opinion about dev-d; which I've personally witnessed). So, that should not concern or bother anybody. However, the sad part was the review by one of the famous critics. He gave delhi-6 a 1.5 star but that's ok; the problem is – he said that it tried to be another RDB but failed miserably in reaching those heights attained by its predecessor. Co-incidentally, the same reviewer gave 2 stars to RDB (check rediff archive for the same); now was he referring that "2-star performance" as "those heights"?? Well, I'm confused.

 

Congratulations and Celebrations

"Congratulations!!!"

I did not want to start this post with the clichéd statement of "I'm back yet again" (in the blogsphere, this must have been associated to me big time, by now). So, I chose more relevant word to begin with. Well, this congratulation is in the context of Oscars. Well, I am amongst those people who "don't" consider Slumdog Millionaire as an Indian film (quite unlike our media); we may call it a global film to be on safe side but definitely not an Indian film. And hence I'm rather happier for our A.R. Rehman (ARR) and Resul Pookutty than for Slumdog Millionaire or Smile Pinki.

It is true that somebody like ARR doesn't need an Oscar Award as a certification for being the great; however this recognition definitely matters on the global front. Despite all those allegations regarding various biases, there are no two opinions on the fact that Academy Awards provide the most celebrated and most recognized stage to stakeholders of entertainment industry. Though these awards are mostly confined to Hollywood, apart from a very few categories, still they have a big impact. This is for obvious reasons- Hollywood is the biggest film industry amongst them all. Hence, these awards would definitely boast the prospects of ARR worldwide.

However one thing which has fascinated me the most, during the course of this series of events, was another proof for the saying - 'Life is strange'. Actually, I tried asking my gtalk contacts yesterday (thanks to all those replied and sorry to whom I couldn't ask) as what has been their ARR's favorite song as of now. I know that it was a very small sample size but still I think that it would reflect a general Indian public trend. Roja was the hands-down winner and other responses ranged from Taal to Kannathil Mutthamittal to Dil Se to Jodha Akbar to Boys to Lagaan to Bombay to Rang De Basanti to Delhi 6; but interestingly and not-so-surprisingly, there was not even a single person speaking about 'Jai Ho' or Slumdog Millionaire. Most of us believe that the soundtrack and music was really good in this picture, but would not possibly feature even in all time top 5 of ARR. However, in context of achievements/popularity/recognition, this one proved to be The One and this really fascinates me.

Again a lot of Congratulations to all ARR fans, and wish you all a very Happy Mahashivratri!