After a Long Hiatus….Welcome 2009!!!!!

It’s been sometime, I picked up my Laptop for writing anything. Not because I shunned my passion for writing, but I was busy in a wild goose chase. To tell people who don’t know me personally, I was preparing for CAT (An entrance test for MBA in Indian colleges). For the general knowledge of my esteemed readers, this year there were just 2.76 Lakh (0.276 Million) candidates vying for 1800 seats. So now you know why I say it’s a wild goose chase. But to be true, preparation for MBA has definitely helped me if not getting a seat in some suitable MBA college. Most importantly I got some time to introspect on what I need and want to do in near future. Not that I am better now with my confused self. But at least it made me think away from the dead end of the IT Sector. I am still not very convinced of some solid reason why I should be pursuing an MBA degree except for the fact that I want to get out of IT Sector. Hope better sense prevails in coming days and I am more sure of where am heading. Hey wait…I am not writing this to start cribbing again. I have done enough of that with different set of people time and again.

Actually after a long time, I picked up a book to read. Onitsha by J.M.G. Le Clezio. The book is winner of 2008 Nobel Prize for literature and written in French and translated in English by Alison Anderson. Nice book. Language is not rhetoric but has music like flow. It has the power to sensitize all your sense organs as it is full of atmosphere – sights, sounds and smells. But what is important to me is it brought back the zeal of writing again. With a happening but not so fruitful 2008 behind me, I am actually looking for some sheer commitment from my side in 2009. I have a long list in my mind. Nothing different from 2008 though. The only difference I want this year is my commitment to do things. Let’s see how it goes. First of all there are lots of topics on which I want to write. So would be starting on that soon. So keep checking this space and I promise this place won’t be so dry in days to come. I am also taking my photography passion seriously as well. We took a photography trip to Bannergatta park recently. Please check out the photos in Photo Gallery. Also with CAT out of bag now I have to start the prep for GMAT. So these are the primary things on cards and also planning for some more stuff as well but will take it as it comes. Hoping to keep the creative flame burning within me here goes my first post of 2009.

Jaane Tu….Ya Jaane Na (Review)

Abbas Tyrewala, the acclaimed writer of movies like Maqbool and Munnabhai MBBS has chosen a rather simple and no frill story for his directorial debut. The story of Jane Tu…has nothing much to offer in terms of its content but the way story has been told made all the difference. Jane tu…by no parameter can be considered a path breaking teen film like we have seen Ishq vishq or dil chahta hai. You will find traces of films like Chalte Chalte, Ishq Vishq, Dil Chahta Hai or even Hum Paanch (Ratna Pathak speaking to Naseerudhin Shah in photo frame) along with airport climax which has been tried nth time in bollywood. Basically it seemed that director tried to spoof old scenes of tried and tested love stories of past something that he already tried although as a writer in “Main Hoon Na”. But except few occasions it worked fine.

 

It’s this kind of candid, relatable freshness that characterises Abbas Tyrewala’s directorial debut, a deftly made film about friendship. There’s a pretty distinctive line between films trying to be innocent, and films that actually come across as charmingly naive as this one. The best thing of Jane Tu…is even though it’s a teen flick; it does not indulge itself in bath room jokes to tickle the funny bones of the audience which is very easy temptation post American Pie days. Its take on the friendship and relations is as innocent and naïve like small town school kids.

 

Another fact that makes Jaane Tu a little special — as is the case with most films about friendship — is a rock-solid ensemble cast that is mouthwateringly perfect. Take a bow, casting director Pakhi, this is a helluva nice set of good actors, with refreshingly unfamiliar faces.

The story revolves around a set of friends, there life in general and focuses on one couple that’s in love. They mistook their feelings as mere friendship and needed a series of events, match making etc to make them understand and acknowledge their feeling towards each other. Khan plays the peace-loving Jai Singh Rathore, more for the promise he had made to his activist mom Ratna Pathak rather than his real traits. He himself is oblivious of his actual self and keeps watching weird dreams of a masked man in horse with a sword. The story involves his friendship with effervescent Aditi and in process of finding love for himself; he ends up finding his own self.

 

We have seen similar stories time and again in bollywood but Jane Tu….stands out just because of the way subject has been handled and the performances of each one of the actor.

 

 

Here are few things in the movie that worked

 

1. The characterisation of each actor has been perfect and no way has any character been left without a proper boundary within which they have to perform. Even a small role of Rajat Kapur stands out and has been properly etched.

 

2. The acting is top-notch all through the film. Ratna Pathak is magnificent, Prateik Babbar bestows the film with angst and maturity, Jayant Kripalani and Anuradha Patel make a great affable couple, Rajat Kapur’s is awesome in such a small role, Naseeruddhin Shah is hilarious and paresh rawal as usual a delight to watch. But the onus of the entire film was on the group of six friends who carry the film on their shoulder. Each one does justification to there role whether its Karan Makhija as the pessimistic yet lovable Rotlu, Alishka Varde as Bombs, Nirav Mehta as highly accented gujju Jignesh, the one persistent yet affectionately etched caricature in the film and then there’s Sugandha Garg as the spirited, nickname-giving Shaleen, full of spunk.

 

3. But the actor to watch out was Genelia. It is really Genelia who steals the show. The actress is a real livewire on screen and conveys those annoying feelings of jealousy, confusion, irritability and fake happiness without any problem. Although her Hindi diction in many scenes was not proper but needless to say that added to her cuteness. I loved her in Boys many years ago but watching her in a Hindi flick is a treat.

 

4. The cinematography is good and the urbane feel has been captured properly which is very essential for a film like this.

 

5. Another thing that needs special mention is the back ground score. It is the back ground score that makes many scenes special. It hits you right at the time and never goes over bound or making it loud.

 

 

Things that did not work in the movie

1. This is the launching pad for Imran Khan and thus should have been the showcasing film for him. He might be cute but surely he did not have the charisma like his mamu jaan, at least not in this movie. His body language was quite restricted in initial scenes and facial expression stiff. Although in few scenes he was good like when he saved Manjari in the disc but that’s not all. He need to work more on his screen presence and body language as he might not be as lucky next time with such a great supporting star cast and great execution.

2. The film is painfully long. By the time film ends, it seems like an eternity. Editing was badly required for a lot of scenes. After some time, few sequences seem to be repeated.

3. The characters of love interests of Jay and Aditi was given more screen time than required.

4. Character of Amit (Aditi’s brother) as a physically or mentally challenged fellow was not properly etched. There was no explanation provided for his behaviors as well.

5. There is no variation in the pace of the film; hence it feels all the more slow and draggy sometimes.

6.  Screenplay could have been more taught and grappling and that would have made the movie all the more effective.

 

All in all, this is what is called popcorn entertainment with lots of popcorn and soda in Sunday afternoon with friends.

 

G.O.D – Grand Old Dawn

Disclaimer: The thoughts and ideas mentioned in this article are totally mine. These views are not against any individual or groups. Each one has their own views and opinion on the topic and I respect them as well. I would like to have a free and open mind to assimilate more ideas on the topic which is as vast and vivid as the opinion on the topic.

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that frightens us most. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and famous?’ Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that people won’t feel insecure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in all of us. And when we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others. – One of the speech by Nelson Mandela

If there is one discussion that would evoke emotion from each one of us, will be the topic of God. Nothing apart from the essence of the almighty is so well ingrained within us that we sometime tend to forget or realize the source of it. It hardly matters whether an individual has grown up in developed countries like America, Britain etc or in civilization as barbaric and savage as in the jungles of Africa. Each civilization has manifested, that belief in god is something that have come up irrespective of the region, social need or any particular purpose of it. Each civilization has a different history to tell accompanied with wide variety of genetically wired humans in each of it. It is sometime difficult to compass the concept of god being so alike in each of the civilization as if the source is one. Still, people around the word over ages have believed in polytheism, concept of multiple gods. Each religion has a different god, Hinduism itself have some few million gods to worship.

As a logical thinker, I have always wondered how god can be different in each language and society given the fact that I understood the purpose of god as a father figure to combat the eternal feeling of fear. I have always believed that fear is something that is inherently human and any other form of emotion arises with manipulation of fear.

As remarked by Richard Dawkins in his much acclaimed book “The Selfish gene”, every individual or rather gene is propelled by selfishness to survive and evolve and not the altruism that was the previous popular belief. The selfish nature of the gene in my opinion is because of the inherent fear of survival. People have the liberty to choose some belief and this is the one that I decided to choose.

Having said that, I could never comprehend the meaning of god given the fact I was always confused between which god to worship or believe in. later in my school days I came across the concept of monotheism that is belief in one god. I found it much easy to convince my logical mind but along with the concept came up confusion to decide the form of god I should believe in. For years my mind wandered from one form to another trying to hold on to a state which could be permanent fixture of the form of god. I did not find any. Innumerable deities for innumerable purposes could not convince me the reality and validity of their existence, and slowly I chucked out any possibility of the existence of human god, to the extent of being an atheist.

But might be we humans are programmed in such a way that we can not escape the bond between us and the god. We all are tangled in a huge and complex thread that connects each one of us, like bubbles in an ocean. That might connect with god as well. Somewhere in my heart I felt an eternal quest for that search, search for the meaning of our existence, search I had envisioned in some wild nights staring at the stars when I was a kid. The quest was lost in the worldly battles and I convinced myself with the denial of any such existence of god firmly.

As a child I was more intrigued by the mystic philosophy of science rather than the vivid display of religious and mythological doctrines. And I soon decided that science would be the ultimate answer to the existence of life, as I had already failed in my quest to understand life reasoning it with the existence of god. Not that I made any specific effort to understand it but belief I feel is more powerful than the actual manifestation of the idea that you believed in first place.

Recently I read a book called “Code Named God” and my belief in science strengthened more. I felt science provided more logical answers and direction to the quest that I had long buried deep inside my heart.

Coming to science, we all know that each one of us is made of tiny particles called atoms which in turn made up of further small particles. Science has already shown that these particles are nothing but a form of energy. For that matter any mass is just a different way to look into energy and nothing apart from it. They are the two sides of the same coin. The energy that we perceive in different forms is nothing but different fields acting at different level. Much recently it was believed that each field is different to other in terms of its properties and the jurisdiction of area where it acts. But with recent developments, the unified field theory allows all of the fundamental forces between elementary particles to be written in terms of a single field. The same field when acting at different temperature and distance gave rise to different energy levels which became the basic premise for the formation of matter and in turn the entire universe. It has been postulated that universe started some 15 billion light years ago with a big bang. But what happened just after the big bang? The disequilibrium created the big bang and the huge energy that was created expanded. With expansion, the energy level fell to a certain extent which gave rise to the creation of the first particle of the universe and then slowly atoms, molecules of hydrogen and subsequently each element came into picture. These elements took the form of universe we know it today.

But the question remains, why did big bang happen at the first place? It has been shown that the there are enough negative energy in the universe and the total energy of the universe is 0. So can something be created from nothing? Can zero energy give rise to something as vast and vivid as this universe? Who was present before the big bang to see it happen? Are we any way connected to that single point, just before the big bang? It seems to be taxing to our human mind.

Let me illustrate a simple experiment that was done to understand the non locality of the particle behavior. It is well known factor that to observe any incident, the observer has to be present in the near vicinity (Not considering other means that could make the incident visible). A particular laser was made to strike a crystal to create 2 entangled photons. With entangle, I mean these two photons were supposed to have properties that were dependent on each other. That is the property of one proton do not exists without the existence of the property of other photon. Once these two photons were created by the laser striking the particular crystal, they were separated in two different directions. That is the two entangled photons were now separated in space by quite a distance. This experiment although easy to illustrate was no simple feat given the fact the apparatus used were not recently developed, even though the theory of the experiment was postulated by Einstein to understand the grand unified theory or the theory of everything. Coming back to the experiment, it was observed that when one of the photons’ properties was changed, it changed the property of the other photon even though the other entangled photon was not connected to the first photon by any means and was separated in space. This experiment proved that to be connected to one another do not require being in the same space or even in the same time frame.

The experiment illustrated few very important property of any particle or field. That is a particle can be entangled to some other point which might be at the other end of the universe and still can behave in similar ways. And with that another question also gets answered. An event can happen in absence of an observer. Thus the occurrence of big bang was not dependent on the availability of any observer.

Regarding the concept I was discussing, how something could be created from nothing. Is it possible for zero energy to give rise of something as vast as universe? But we should understand that the word “nothing” do not have any significance. “Nothing” can not be seen in totality of itself. Absence of “something” gives rise to “nothing”. Zero can not be attributed just as nothing. It is mid point of positive and negative numbers. It is the starting point for two sides of positive and negative increments to the extent of infinity on the both side. It is opposite of infinity as well. If we understand the existence of universe as two extremes of positive and negative energies, it is not difficult to comprehend that zero might have given rise to whatever existing as of today.

With the advances in science it has been easy to understand the existence of a particle and the formation of the universe. We have been able to justify and understand the matter as it exists today in different forms and its relation with the energy and the fields. But why we are the “thinking being”, trying to understand our own existence. Is mind and matter one and the same or they are different?

As the great mathematician and philosopher “Descartes” made clear distinction between the thinking substance that distinguishes us as a man and the matter that makes up the physical universe including our own body. Descartes defined matter in terms of two properties only – extension is space (length, breadth, depth, time) and motion. All other apparent properties depend on the perceiver and are the result of the impact of physical objects on the sense organs. Mind as he proclaimed is essentially non-physical or incorporeal. The mind that makes us understand and question the existence of life is the mind that exists in each of us. It is something like mind trying to understand itself. It is more like understanding the link between us and the single point where the origin exists. He also argued that, in contrast to the physical world, the mind is an indivisible unit. This is also the philosophy of almost all the religion. So if mind is an indivisible unit, where does the source of it exist?

Or the source is same for both mind and matter. It is very unlikely that when the universe is so much over simplified in terms of its existence to a single point that it would have different sources, one for mind and other for matter. It is just a matter of time that we realise that both mind and matter are interwoven and interlinked and the existence of one is not possible in absence of other, similar to the experiments of the entangled photons. That is the existence of the entire material universe is not possible without the existence of the mind in each particle that exists within that material universe. Everything within the universe is being entangled to that single point of zero energy which is the source of all. We are nothing but part of that source and the source exists in each of us. Although separated by couple of billion light years our mind is still entangled to that point which is the source of everything. May be that we should call as god.

God creates out of nothing. Wonderful you say. Yes, to be sure, but he does what is still more wonderful: he makes saints out of sinners. –Kierkegaard