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.

Ten Issues - 4

1- Half-life of the Coal Child : Not many know that the dangerous and suffocating rat mines of Meghalaya are worked by 70,000 child miners. Following them into hellish pits, Kunal Majumder exposes the dark veins of an exploitative industry.

2- Glory, piety and politics : With Pakistan’s two main political parties looking exhausted by being made to play a continuous game of cat and mouse with the establishment, the new generation of young Pakistanis began to look elsewhere.

3- A Short History of Rebellion" : TSI discovers that most fade away or come back ‘home’. Some do make history–for better or worse.

4- Interview of Maulana Abul Kalam Azad given to the famous journalist Shorish Kashmiri for a Lahore based Urdu magazine, Chattan, in April 1946.

5- Of grids and groups: An alternative view of "open" and "closed" societies.

6- Over 200,000 Narmada Dam oustees still to be rehabilitated; A crime that goes unpunished for 25 years.

7- Killings of Ahmadis unleashes fresh soul-searching over Pakistan’s identity : The soul-searching is particularly acute given that the suppression of the Ahmadis is officially endorsed by the state.

8- The 7 Habits of Highly Ineffective People : The thing about habits is that for good and bad they require no thinking.

9- Invisible environmentalists : They forage the city, collecting and sorting often hazardous waste when the city sleeps and by day they are gone. Most of them are women and we have no long-term policy in place that looks at their welfare or health, writes Kalpana Sharma.

10- The Great Bhopal Killing : Read here complete history of Disaster.

In Between, Abhishek Singhvi who is the spokesperson of Congress is also the legal representative of DOW Chemicals (the company that purchased Carbide). Not only that, he is also a member of the committee that is supposed to investigate the Bhopal incident. So on the one hand he is an investigator, and on the other, he protects the legal interests of DOW. What a wonderful world !

The Necessity of Blasphemy - 2

For Starters, Abhrahmic religions are primary monotheistic faiths of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam practised in the West. They are more based on faith and blind submission than free will. Eastern religions have Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism,Shinto, Taoism and Confucianism.

Let us start over with an analogy. Eskimos have nine names for snow because they know different kinds of snow. Now no other language can have nine names for snow; Same is true for Eastern religions. That's because they have deep understanding due to analysis on the human consciousness and religion. Now the West has all the words for science. In the East we have to coin words for scientific terminology; East don’t have it. Since a lot of metaphysical scrutiny has been done on human consciousness and nature, eastern religions have evolved more than their Western counterparts.

As far as religion is concerned the whole world will have to follow the East, because East has worked deep down into the interior most being. The 2nd evolved phase of scrutiny will start then after. There is nothing like Blasphemy in Eastern religions. If blasphemy was considered as a crime, then Buddha would be hanged in the first place. West regards any attack on religion as a sign of sin. That's why eminent atheist like Richard Dawkins, Sama Harris, Bill Maher and Christopher Hitchens attacks on Abhrahmic religion with logic and rational reasoning. Since human nature has not been studied by theirs religious priest, they look completely out of place in defending institutions of Islam, Judaism and Christianity.

I don’t have anything against any specific Muslim, Hindu or christian individual.I hold my defiance against Islam, Hinduism and Christianity. A society where one lives as an individual and not as a community is the answer to several of our social ills. Its the struggle between Individual Vs Institutions. Eastern religions are individual oriented while Western religions defend Institutions. An individual is a basic unit that can be changed with love, tolerance and compassion. The institutions have to be made, demolished and recreated with the time. People defend their faith without analyzing it completely and gives no place to doubt. Doubt is the important part of human nature through which trust is developed by testing the nature of person or religion. West waits for Judgement day at the end of linear time and East goes on the cyclic nature of time. The circular nature of time makes Eastern religion dynamic and rigidity in the interpretation is lost.

Any religion must be tolerant enough not sticking to a yardstick principle. You can criticise your own kind, but not foreigners, because they are unbridgeable different to you. The argument that outsiders should not be allowed to criticise any religion is being used more and more to thwart campaigns for reform. Hence, abolition of blasphemy laws and human rights should be included in interpretation of any faith based teachings. People everywhere, it turned out, want the same basic rights – and in every culture, there remain thugs who will try to take those rights away.

*Orthodoxy does not protect truth — it protects lies, for only lies need protection. Truth can stand on its own.*