Music as a Therapy

This is part of my experiment to bring together music and writing. It is a simple technique where I listen to some songs which I think are related to the theme of my writing. Today the topic I have in my mind is loss and the human way of comprehending it. It is deeply personal and it can never be a shared experience. Music, I feel will trigger some verbal vibrations in me and I just write about that.

I Made my Excuses and Left – Pet Shop Boys – Fundamental.
Sense of loss is something that grips you when you are alone. You are aware of the absence of something or somebody and your mind is filled with the thoughts. Some of your thoughts can be awkward. But they are deep and intimate. Sometimes it is difficult even to put them in words. Very often, you are drawn into these whirlpools of thoughts.

Puff the magic dragon – Peter, Paul, and Mary.
Your feeling of loss heightens when you remember the good days when you had possessed the object of affection. The word possession is too tough. It is more of a attachment which later on becomes a kind of detached feeling. There is activity and then there is inactivity. You feel as if you are struck somewhere. We feel like slipping into a cave and waiting there for a considerable amount of time.

You are beautiful by James Blunt.
The most important thing which can help you to fight this feeling is to have some hope. That the world is still there with you in it. The saga of life will continue and you have to find some way to make sense out of it. It is good that you slip into a state of hibernation for sometime, provided that you come out of it ASAP. The time will come when you have to face the truth. To put the whole in a simple way – after each bye there is a hi.
With prayers

Language Excercise - Role Models

Role models can be divided into two – personal and impersonal
Personal role models are people who are related to you – by blood
Whereas impersonal role models are people who are outside your circle of relatives
It can be a film star or a successful business man. They inspire you and you feel like imitating them
The exercise is based on impersonal role models – each learner is asked to name their impersonal role models and a list is created for the whole class. The next task is to gets some details regarding the respective role models from the internet or some other source.This step involves research. Learners are exposed to two of the basic steps in a research that is note takin and note making. A brief bio-sketch is made on them and then they are made to prepare a biography on them. The biography is used for role-playing where each and every learner is expected to present their role models in the first person POV using the personal pronoun I. This is an interesting exercise which combines writing and speaking with a sizeable amount of research thrown in.

Manichitrathazhu and the mediocre remakes…

I had been toying with the idea of preparing a movie review of Aamir Khan’s Taare Zammen Par. Anyway I never got the oomph… to do that. So I decided to wait for the next inspiring thing to happen and it materialized last night. Some local cable network was telecasting the Kannada version of the Malayalam landmark movie Manichitrathazhu. Being a so called Malayali I should feel emotional and should feel the rush of blood in my veins. Surprisingly I did not have any emotional outburst. Malayalis themselves are so fragmented in their cultural identities that they least bothered about the word ‘culture’. The ‘Nair tea shop’ has become a universal illustration of this fact. Let me conclude my describing my cultural identity as an ‘assimilated one’.

Manichitrathazhu was a landmark in Malayalam cinema. It is also a significant movie in my life because that was the last movie we as a family watched together. The movie had a powerful script and a team of directors – who were the best from the Malayalam industry. The script was penned by Madhu Muttam. The directors were – Fazil, Priyadarshan, Siddiq Lal, and Sibi Malayil. The actors in the lead were Mohanlal and Shobana.

The same movie was made into three other languages first it was the Kannada version starring Vishnuvardhan and Soundraya. The title of the movie was Apta Mitra

Then there was the Tamil version titled Chandramukhi starring Rajani and Jothika.

The latest version of the movie was Bhool Bhuliya starring Akshay Kumar and Vidya Balan. I do not know whether they have attempted the same in Telugu.

The point I would like to make is that all these three versions of the same movie has failed to do capture the charm and exquisiteness of the original. They are all a foiled attempt to do something. The creative seriousness that was there in the original is lost somewhere. I feel there were unpardonable compromises made on the casting and the special effects. They are all examples for future film makers on how not to make a movie. the remakes have failed in their attempt. They all became money spinning mechanisms rather than artistic attempts.

Anything For You, Ma'am

1 ½ months back I was in Chennai. Apart from haunting the usual places I took some to browse the latest stock of books at Landmark in Gemini Circle. I was surprised to know that there were many new books writing about India. Maybe they can be called as cross-cultural writers. Interestingly I encountered books by many young authors who wrote about their day-to-day experiences. One such author who got my attention was Tushar Raheja and his book - Anything for you, ma’am. There are two reasons why I was tempted to buy this book. The first reason was the price – just 100 bucks and the second reason was that the book dealt with IIT experience. Me, as a person who is still under the Chetan Baghat effect thought that the book will offer something new and fascinating.

Anyway as soon as I reached my home in Bangalore I started reading this second IIT tale. The first two to three pages were uninteresting and I found that I have to push myself through the book. There was nothing new and even the scene where he impersonates Sherya’s father was too deceptive. I felt as if the character has lots its innocence. I never felt that bad financially coz I had spend only 100 bucks. Anyway I thought that I will finish the book however boring it is coz it was the first book that I took up for reading in 2008.

My impression of the book changed as the characters and story evolved. I really started liking the book. The way Tejas proposes to the girl and the candle light dinner with his guitar tunes was really good. But towards the end… it became messy again with the deus ex machina failing terribly and it appears highly improbable.

The Joy of Invigilation

There is storm before and after the calmness. The same can be said of academic atmosphere which prevails in our campus. Before the exams there is the roar and ‘shor’ of students. The voice of the lecturer from the classrooms and the noisy corridors after the class. I have experienced this kind of atmosphere from 2001. Now looking back at these seven years I feel that I enjoy both. Both are essential and integral to any college lecturer.

The exams are here, once again and there is a lull in the campus. Classrooms are transformed into exam halls. Bags are replaced by sheets of class notes. Conversation has become more subject oriented and library is the hot spot...not the cafe.

Normally for a lecturer/teacher, this is supposed to a time for the lengthy, monotonous invigilation. Walking up and down the exam halls, keeping a watchful eye on the candidates who has specialized in the art of malpractice. As usual I tend to think in a different way. I find the exam hall quite interesting and would like to compare it to a prayer hall. It is silent except for the feeble sound of the student’s pen caressing the surface of the answer sheet. The room is filled with numerous thought waves and is best suited for some mental exercise. I like this scenario and if have co-invigilators have I will withdraw into a vantage point to write something on a piece of paper. At MCC, I remember writing pages after pages on life and maybe that’s the place where I came to know that act of writing is therapeutic.

Aristotle on Theater and Climate Change

Aristotle is one of the greatest of the ancient Greek philosophers. He was a student of Plato and he was the teacher of Alexander the Great. He wrote ‘Poetics’ which is regarded as the seminal work on Arts, especially Drama (Theater). The book contains detailed information about the various elements of theater like story, charcter, plot, and the three unities. (Unity of Place, Unity of Time and Unity of Action). Aristotle’s views on Theater were strictly followed by the classical Greek theater tradition. Tragedy writers who were known as the trinities of classical Greek drama (Sophocles - 496-406 BC, Aeschylus - 525-456 BC and Euripides -480-406 BC) practiced Aristotelian theories in their art. Theater for the Greeks was not just a form of entertainment. They saw it as means to understand the problems of life. Hence the genre of Tragedy was popular. Aristotle defined tragedy as the fall of a hero because of a tragic flaw in his charcter, which he described as ‘Hamartia’. It is very clear from this that the character of a person is responsible for his destiny. Oedipus never shied away from truth – he accepted it with courage and was ready to face the consequences. According to Aristotle plot is an important element of Theater.

Aristotle observation on theater also was necessarily his thoughts on Communication. For Aristotle Theater was a form of communication and he regarded theater as a universal concept. Maybe Shakespeare was influenced by this when he said that the world is a stage. Plot was of primary importance to him and he defined it as the arrangement of events on a cause effect way. This idea to certain extent has influenced both Newton and the basic communication paradigm. Newton in his third law of motion defines action as something which has got a equal and opposite reaction. In the communication paradigm the sender receives a feedback for the message he has conveyed.

Noble peace prize for 2007 was divided equally between an institution and an individual i.e. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Albert Arnold (Al) Gore. Their pioneering work in the field of climate change was commended and the Nobel peace foundation said that was for ‘for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change’.
Al Gore is the leading public advocate of the need to take immediate action to reduce anthropogenic climate change. His campaigning takes many forms, including the Academy Award-winning film An Inconvenient Truth and a book of the same name.
The IPCC was established by the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in 1988 to provide policymakers with neutral summaries of the latest information related to human-induced (or anthropogenic) climate change.

Aristotle’s concept of communication which is based on his cause effect pattern helps us to understand the fact that every human being is accountable for the climate change. There is no point in kick starting a blame game. Like a tragic Greek character, each one of us should take the responsibility and find an amicable solution for this global phenomenon. It is better to see the scenario from the point of view of the butterfly effect which also illustrates chaos theory. The phrase refers to the idea that a butterfly's wings might create tiny changes in the atmosphere that ultimately cause a tornado to appear (or prevent a tornado from appearing).

References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect
http://nobelprize.org/
Microsoft Encarta 2006

Christmas Mood In Malaysia

The following snaps shows the christmas celeberation at Malaysia

My friend and well-wisher Dr Vallabhai forwarded it to me...

Thank you sir...this is something special...

Love Objectified

Oh yes, I have known love and again love,
And many other kinds of love
But of that tenderness I felt then,
Is there nothing I can say?
- Andre Gide, Fruits Of Earth

Love- this ‘four-lettered’ word ignites everything in this world. Hearts, bodies, and souls. As you read this, it has ignited my brain too (not my heart, dear reader). I am aware of one quality about love. It is a very positive emotion, which can save this planet. (from hatred, enmity, falsehood). Love is something that has many faces and phases: It is also an emotion/energy that is always focussed on someone or something. In order to love we need an ‘Other’. It can be our mother, father, next-door girl, our own body, street car, ice cream, first birthday gift, your Barbie doll, your GI toy, bicycle, laptop, sports icon… (I will leave the task of completing the inventory to you).Everybody is born with this innate quality. If you see an old man begging and if you feel sad - then you are exercising some part of this human capability. For me the so-called boy-girl relationship is nothing but the culmination of the all the ‘so-called’ love exchanges that is scattered in one’s life. Let me end with a quote from - The Monk who sold his Ferrari. ‘Unless you love yourself, you cannot love your friend’.

If I am not for myself, who will be for me?
And if I am not for others, what am I?
And if not now, when?
Hillel (Ancient Hebrew Sage)

New Year Resolutions...

The year 2008 began with a spate of traveling which saw me sleeping for two consecutive nights in a bus. It was a painful ride especially for my posterior. It still hurts and today,even, the sight of a bus petrifies me. I have taken a vow that I will never board a bus at least for the next one week. This is the first time that I am driven by an experience to make a New Year resolution. I am filled with enough wisdom that I have decided to make short term resolution this year just to satisfy the whim of making a New Year resolution.

When I asked my students about their New Year resolutions I received many full of zest and energy:

I want to fall in love this year
I am going to visit my friend with whom I had a bitter fight in the past
I am going to learn how to cook
I plan to go on a pilgrimage to Mecca
I want to open a ban account and will deposit my first salary in it
I will go abroad to do higher studies

I felt really inspired by all these words which hopefully will be transformed into solid action. I sometimes feel that people make these b*&^@y resolutions just for the heck of it. Anyway there are some people who stick to their words and my heart goes out to them.

My contention regarding is that I do not want any change to happen to me or my little life. I will be really happy if things go like this for the rest of my life. Changes will happen as they should happen. I believe in the power of destiny which can affect a permanent change in our lives. All others wo/man made changes are temporary. I have gone through the thick but passable walls of experience and I have re-emerged on the other side with a changed outlook and these cross-overs in life are full with meaning and purpose. So I wish, that all my students experience this change and become wise, wiser and the wisest.