We Live Cinema!

I have quite "diverse" movie-watching and reading habits. As someone who feels equally comfortable watching Kurosowa and cheaply-made B-grade movies, the principle of diversity holds good. The fundamental principle of aesthetics is to acquire excellent taste one has to be able to recognize both ugliness and beauty, which is applicable to the whole range of human experience. It is important to understand what should be accepted and what must be rejected.

Cinema is there to reflect our lives, dreams, ambitions, and hidden desires on the celluloid. Reality and Myths can't be separated but diversion towards one will lead to an uneven balance of the world view. We don't watch cinema for consumption only but to refresh ourselves with entertainment or reflect on our lives.

It took great effort to create the art by an artist. It is so much greater than what it costs us to consume only. The experience may be greater than consumption but the filmmaker is giving us gifts without a doubt. A filmmaker is an artist who creates an uneven exchange, brings himself closer to the recipient, creates change, and does it all with the right spirit.

One of the great joys of cinema is the ability to be transported into another time and place with the theme of universal appeal. Looking at Indian Cinema all these years, we ought to have produced some directors who could have captured our imagination and brought crowds to watch cinema of world standards.

Cinema is deeply personal like any other form of art. The Western expectation of Indian cinema continues to be exotic (read "poverty porn") and according to defenders of Bollywood fare, it should be infused with song and dance aka Broadway style. Such an expectation of the West from every bit of non-Hollywood cinema will tend to distort our cinematic vision. The originality will disappear when we always want to prove our quality without rooting our films in our own culture.

Originality and dareness to speak truth is the prime responsibility of any artist. Even a Kafkaesque cat-and-mouse game of promotion and censorship holds on the content of the art. No cinema-loving filmmaker will finish his piece of art as a propaganda film. And even in the threats of hooligan groups, it's the responsibility of each artist to take a stand. We need to be inspired by the stand taken against institutionalized oppression of government by Chinese, Iranian, or Russian filmmakers.

A new generation of filmmakers in India is now engaging with the most varied facets of a society that is oddly locked in the tension between optimism and stagnation, between attraction towards the past and fascination with the computer age. And the high point is that this new generation of filmmakers is embedded with a socio-economic confidence lacking in the previous generation. We are living in cinema with these filmmakers. By questioning the conformist norms of society through the medium of cinema, I will live the life of a cinephile. I am here due to a pure love for cinema, a middle ground between the ignorance of the mobs and the pseudo intellects with an attempt to drive their film love to this new horizon.