To BE or not to BE.........continues

By the time you would read this half of my collegemates would’ve been placed in high flying MNC’s and I’ll remain a pen pushing negligee (typist rather).Good morning friend’s, in a few month’s I’ll be a free man. Yes I will not be having coffee at 7:00 breakfast at 7:30 to catch a cab at 8:00am. I’ve got used to this routine ,early morning monotony and idiosyncrasy of telling myself that it will be a good day in college today. I will tell you about my college later but I will tell you how I got there in the first place. I probably wouldn’t have made into IIT, I got thrown out after screening test. Screening test is a sacred ritual those who pass are deemed fit for future life and are not scorned for life if they drop a year for dedicated study ,those who fail are condemned from the educated middle class (that’s my sarcastic version). In the uncalvinist part of town where I live, the general wisdom is that you can’t crack JEE without special coaching but snoot boots like me don’t fall for the pose. So after CBSE board and half a dozen entrance test’s later I moved up to a college called “BMXYZ” By week2, I was certain I didn’t really want to study there. The teachers were bad. Some taught out of yellowing notes, some taught utter rubbish and some just didn’t bother. 75% attendance is compulsory . And in keeping with the generallly repressive regime , playing tennis ball cricket in the college premises wasn’t allowed. Going by the penchant of our college in imposing fines they must have collected a huge revenue. The only reason I think I stuck around that place with its moribund intellectual atmosphere was because I thought (and my parents thought ) the degree was worth hanging around for. I still have remanants of days where it was difficult to find admission in any Engg. institute but when I will graduate I am sure this degree will mean very less for my employer or anyone else. I learnt more out of the class than inside. The reason I’m saying this is because the admissions in college’s for the next academic year are about to start and it has brought memories flooding in. I remember thinking I wouldn’t have lost interest in engineering were it not for the pathetic academic atmosphere. As for MBA to be honest I had lost interest before the exam date. However there are several among my friends who have suffered grievous long term damage from the boring atmosphere in college. None of them was stupid. In fact some were smarter than the toppers. They were more original more creative and more rebellious and that got them into trouble. Now our HRD ministers always turn his and the country’s attention on fixing up tuition fees for IIT’s and IIM’s. This is probably first thing they do after coming to seat. I don’t really know if it’s a good or a bad thing .On the other hand , college like mine and countless others where about 98% of India’s engineers and managers come from do need an urgent looking into. They don’ have teachers, they don’t get funds, recruiters avoid them , and students suffer untold miseries.

(sorry this post is self centred and talks of misery, i am sure i'll make amends
next time......)

The Talkies

AS A CHILD starts to explore the world, many things are accepted the way they come. For me cinema was a similar obvious presence. The language of film was still beyond my comprehension, but I was anyways enthralled by the larger than life moving images. The first film I saw - ‘Laurel and Hardy’ - I still remember Laurel trying to fix a car by putting it up on a jack. The jack gave way and the car fell on his foot. The rest of the class laughed, as he jumped out with pain. I felt sorry for him.We were shown children film’s and cartoon movies on projector in junior school. Movie time meant a day of much mirth and enjoyment. And my favourite cartoon character was a cunning beaver “moolo”. Then came television. Films became more accessible. Days were short and there were lots of ways of having fun. But I still remember those Sunday evenings, between homework and guests, amid all the hustle and bustle, the TV set still flickering in one corner. It didn’t care whether anybody looked at it or not. From a weekly dose of one film, to now an average of almost one film a day. Cinema still holds much to reveal. My film education, initially, on autopilot, with only involuntary realisations about the medium, has slowly turned into a time consuming study of a language. ‘Sooraj Ka Saatwaan Ghoda’ holds a special position in my personal filmawareness bank. I was in my 7th standard.Watching ‘Sooraj…’ on Doordarshan. I had a vague idea who Shyam Benegal was, but the typical ‘art-movie’ look was a complete putoff. Anyways, halfway through the movie, all of a sudden, I sat up. It was something abnormal I had seen in the film. The sequence that had just occurred was a repetition of a sequence they had shown sometimes back, but through different camera angles. And then I realised we had gone back in time to revisit the scene,but from a different point of view, through a different character. And the information in the overlap was what we were looking for. This was my first revelation of alternative film structure (and also the idea that a film has a structure) - the fact that in a film ‘LIFE’ can be shuffled at somebody’s will, to help us understand things better. However, later I learnt that the Bible is one of the first narratives with parallel stories. The story of Christ is told four times, by four of his disciples. After that going back to Enid Blyton was a little difficult, so I picked up ‘Midnight’s Children’ - though I could - though I could hardly afford it. Almost two years after I had seen the film ‘Jurassic Park’, I got hold of the book. In my tenth standard, and still not consciously aware about the process of filmmaking, I guessed it would be fun to read the ‘movie’ in words. I had assumed the film to be a complete visual translation of the book. To my surprise, it was nowhere close.Then I realised this is what they call ‘adaptation’. At this point I must also talk about a friend of mine, Deepak I believe he has an innate sense of filmmaking. He should have been a filmmaker, but unfortunately he is a engineer now, editing 0s and 1s instead. We have spent hours trying to re-structure a book called ‘BhootBangla’, a contemporary version of Lolita, into a movie. At that time both of us, with our gathered vocabulary of filmmaking, tried endlessly to satisfy each other, giving up after the first sequence. Around that time another profession caught my fancy. Two-timing between films and PCM, I have been committing professional adultery. The process of capturing life and experience into a set of cleverly choreographed visuals and sound. No other medium can be as seductive as cinema. It is much more than entertainment, for those who see it; and more than an art form, for those who make it. People discover themselves in movies. ‘Close up’ by Kiarostami and ‘Camera Buff’ by Kieslowski come to mind. In ‘Camera Buff’, the lead character gets highly engrossed into film making,which causes a rift in his relationship with his wife. He and his wife quarrel, and as she stomps out of the room in anger, he lifts his hands to make a frame between his fingers and looks through it. Even a spirit couldn’t possess anybody this strong. Salman Rushdie says there is something predatory about photography - a portrait is a shoot, and the subject the trophy. Cinema eats up the soul. My mother says in their time they used to call films ‘Magic Lantern’. And a magic lantern it is.