Friday, March 18, 2011

A Writer’s Block

I am facing the problem of Writer’s Block these days. Wikipedia describes the Writer’s Block as ‘a condition associated with writing as a profession in which an author loses the ability to produce new work. New ideas and words were refusing to come out of my head from last 15-20 days. The ability too look at flashback and produce some work is even seems to be confiscated somewhere.

Unsuccessful attempt at IRMA this year has worsened my conditions and inability to work pro actively at office has been affecting career growth. I was not emotionally drained out but exhausted to a certain extent. A zone of uncertainty has been flying over my professional future.

Today, I felt different from regular days. The bright and sunny day has given a new energy inside me. With INDIA going to work and school in full flow seems heartening. A song of movie Sarfarosh playing all along in the cab also lifted my spirit while coming to office now.

Cinema has come as savior currently. I have seen 3 movies of the same director recently and what impresses was the ambiguous dialogues of them. Chungking Express (1994), In the Mood for Love (2000 and 2046 (2004) . This period of depression has forced me to engage more in books also. I have read 2 books in 3 days, quite an abnormal activity as compared to the track record of 10 books read last year. I also have realization that all moderates are not liberal. The norms of moderates are indifferent to extreme in normal situation.

I am coming to the senses once again painfully and gradually.  I am Coming back to the Life...


Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Shades of Madness

If I don't write what I think, what's the point of being mad? But madness is sometimes over rated. When you are not able to think and even feel, it is the worrisome part. Relevance, Idea and Technique seems as far reaching personal goals at this spot of time.

The qualities of openness, patience and insight is deceasing at a slow rate due to mechanical life. I am feeling alone and ponder over my low emotional quotient. Beneath silence, all that is intimate, delicate and refined is crushed out of experience.

Reality is dependent om our sensitivity and the nature of the consciousness. One should never do anything against conscience, even if the friends and family demands it. Conscience is what will hurt when everything and everyone will give thumbs up for the word or act.

Through writing, I want to examine intimate of human emotions and controversial issues. Shades of solidarity with others is least in me but the taboos bite me. And distilling self experiences through word gives a bizarre feeling of auto-cannibalism.

I have read few Arabic poems in English these days. Despite of the loss of feelings in the translation, this desert language is the rhythmic and haunting in the nature. Familiarity with people or words bred not contempt  but love, understanding and tolerance. Relations needs to be revisited to discover fresh nuances of meaning. Still same damned emotions inspire more non sense than life in all forms.

I am not ready to accept that absurdity and irrationality as a prime factors on the decision taking ability of the human. I respect emotional integrity of human relations that is universal in the nature for scrutiny others.

It takes conviction and courage to take a stand and be on receiving end of all ridicule and criticism. In order to turn convention upside down, one needs a particularly firm grip on convention itself. Unconventional writing is difficult and a mere arrangement of clumsy and random sentences can't form an off-beat literature. The inherent incapacity for sustained constructive thinking blocks the continuity of the observation.

Flamboyance without content is apt to degenerate into gimmick sooner or later. We invest a lot of efforts to reach for fame within mainstream and the same popularism gives one an unapproachable aura. An individual raised to Demigod status through stupidity. That is a paradox of acting or writing on the public demand.

Sarcasm suits me as I am able to observes the hate, hypocrisy and superiority complex hiding deep down in the psyche of myself and fellow people. It helps me to overcome the harshness of the reality and, eases the pain of scars, deceit, violence and deep embedded anger against them.

I had great anger on caste, cultural, regional and religious traditions that limit one's identity through ghettos. The generations after me will not live this kind of life — that’s what I decided. I will change my destiny by just existing in my own skin.

I may be the silent majority but I am a loud minority.

Sunday, March 6, 2011

Cry

Procrastination leads the daily life,
Delusional and narcissistic thinking,
Anguish of dispossession and exile.
To accept that I am alone is so difficult.

A feeling of monotonous, mechanical and boring life.
The wheels of fortune seems to be stuck somewhere in the traffic jam of daily routine .

Oration skill is over rated and the silence is maddening phase.
The jumble of thoughts, the search for a partner,
The anxiety and fear of loosing everything ;
Wanna be able to say anything,
Without any fear, embarrassment or hesitation.

A thankless job.
Efficiently constructing mythical monetary security
While bearing the immense loss of creativity, spark and spontaneity inside.

Dropping the addiction habits may help in creating nothingness.
Hanging past and fearing future are eating the present moment.

Difficult to eradicate hate from the heart;
A soul that has never been loosened by unrestricted love,
Prejudices grow there, firm as weeds among rocks.

My apologies if you find it all too boring!

Thursday, March 3, 2011

Wadah Khanfar: A historic moment in the Arab world

As a democratic revolution led by tech-empowered young people sweeps the Arab world, Wadah Khanfar, the head of Al Jazeera, shares a profoundly optimistic view of what's happening in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and beyond -- at this powerful moment when people realized they could step out of their houses and ask for change.

As Director General of Al Jazeera, the only international TV network based in the developing world, Wadah Khanfar works to bring rare liberties like information, transparency and dissenting voices to repressive states and political hot-zones. TED LINK



The counter-attack of people on the state is on and we all hail change in Middle East and Africa. As only words that comes in my mind are - Inquilab Zindabad ( a Hindi phrase which translates to "Long Live Revolution").

Sunday, February 27, 2011

Revisiting the Global 1960s

Widely recognized not just as a decade but as a cluster of experiences that stretched over a period of time, the sixties as we now know it drew into its fold, radical politics, Black power, sexual liberation, youthful rebellion, feminism and more. Intellectual currents flowered all across the world alongside a powerful critique of cultural and political authority. The fourteen day strike by students and workers in Paris in the summer of 1968 acquired a mythical after life. The American war in Vietnam triggered a force field of protest and danger all over the world. The spirit of counterculture led to a critique of the family, the creation of alternative lifestyles and drug culture. Latin American experiences of revolutions, military terror and violence; colonialism, anti-colonialism and racial oppression in Africa; the resonance of the Cultural Revolution in China – these reverberated locally and globally. A series of political assassinations rocked the decade. All theories of civilization, race,history, politics, culture and identity were put to test.


It would not be incorrect to suggest that cultural creativity was never quite the same after the sixties. Music, fashion, design, art, architecture, cinema,theatre and performance bear the marks and the traces of this turbulent period of global upheaval. If Minimalism in art practice emerged as a challenge to Pop Art then Conceptual Art posed a critique of formalism. Modernism and the Avant-garde faced a crisis with the rise of Postmodernism while in India, the dominance of the Progressives began to be challenged by an alternative modernism that had a polemical take on indigenism; one aspect of this developed into neo-Tantric abstraction. This decade also saw the first explorations of kitsch and popular culture that later provided the point of rupture with modernism itself. Political theatre acquired a powerful force and Brecht emerged as a new icon for both the West and the post colonial world. Beatlemania and the events of Woodstock transformed the future of rock music as technology reinvented the aesthetics of performance and reception. All Institutions of art faced political criticism even as cinephilia energized a renewed global art cinema movement. Michelangelo Antonioni captured the world of swinging London in Blow-Up, Jean Luc Godard playfully moved the camera to mount his critique of Hollywood, and the release of the first James Bond film gave rise to a new territorial and technological imagination. Latin America gave birth to the Third Cinema Movement and a politically charged Aesthetics of Hunger while in India the New Wave presented a challenge to mainstream film forms and practices.

The 1960s remains an under studied area despite two wars, the crisis of Nehruvian nationalism and modernization programmes, the genocide and traumatic birth of a new nation (Bangladesh) and revolutionary upsurges.

----Adapted from the pamphlet of conference on Revisiting the Global 1960s and its Cultural After life;

Quotation : "The thing the sixties did was to show us the possibilities and the responsibility that we all had. It wasn't the answer. It just gave us a glimpse of the possibility." — John Lennon