Lessons from Imtiaz Ali

Note: Imtiaz Ali is a famous hindi writer/director for films-  jab we met, socha na tha,love aaj kal, rockstar, highway, tamasha.

With the excitement similar to a child during Diwali at heart, I prepare for Imtiaz's films with a dedication of a tenth class student by learning lyrics of all the songs of his upcoming movie before hand so that I don't miss any micro part of the "experience". Be it how he writes interesting characters and fresh dialogues or how music becomes inseparable part of his movies, my list of reasons to love the"Sufi director" (as he is referred to sometimes) runs long. There are certain commonalities I ve observed in his style of storytelling and since my prime years of understanding myself and my environment has gone hand in hand with his movies, sometimes I ve also realized a thing or two.

Being yourself is awesome :
    Our unforgettable "main apni favourite hu" Geet (in jab we met) is one of the most loved characters ever played on silverscreen till date. She makes us want to be the best versions of ourselves and celebrate being one. Her chirpy innocent uninhibited energy is infectious as much as jab we met itself is! She taught me to love myself a little more 😇

Women are more emotionally intelligent : 😉
   Have you observed most of his male protagonists tend to be oblivious to their deep feelings for pretty long , be it in love aajkal, socha na tha or rockstar ? It is their women who kind of have the grace and strength to realise and pursue the relationship. They are the ones who make it happen!  Well it's true..we agree or not.. but we always know. 😜

Travelling can open unknown boundaries in our mind :
    When we travel ,it is not only outer journey to another place but also an inner journey of self exploration and liberation which unwinds many mental knots making us closer to ourselves in the process. Veera (in highway ) who discovers her hidden inner demons  and unleashes them liberating herself or Ved (in tamasha) who sets himself free in Corsica from the suffocation of expectations engulfing him in reality ; both find liberation in lands away from their own eventually celebrating their inner self. For me, just watching Veera or Ved has been liberating! So,l am sure travelling must be really capable of all these wonders!

Honest friendship can be really enriching :
  The break up party in love ajkal after which the ex-es decide to give their honest impressions about each other becoming closer buddies or the "gand machadenge"  rockstar couple who are their most honest self to each other ; they make us crave for that one person with whom you can be your uninhibited self ! Highway goes one step ahead to show a relationship of affection security and longingness which need not even end on a romantic note.

Love is not love if it alters when it finds alteration : 
  Our generation strongly believes that "out of sight is out of mind " and long distance relationship is a myth. On the contrary Imtiaz has time and again told us the opposite. Remember Jai in love aajkal working alone for his dream but with an unknown void or Tara searching Ved for years in tamasha ? He always points it out that the vacuum your love leaves behind cannot be filled no matter how many other choices you have or how busy in life you are. Time does have a wonderful way of showing us what really matters!

Love is the same, then now and forever :
  If you observe ,we don't ve many real deep love stories written in 2000s. Even those few tend to be superficial or skin deep with chiselled bodies making love than two people finding solace in each other.Thanks to Imtiaz Ali we have atleast few gems to show love of our times. As shown in his love aajkal ,though we are supposed to be "love at first sight and break up at first fight" ( in the words of Mahesh Bhat ) generation, all of us thrive on good relationships and suffer from the same side effects of being in love ! 😂

Most times I cannot differentiate if this man makes me discover myself or makes new additions to what I am. Nevertheless few of these are my observations and few what I took away from his stories..😃 Do share if you have any..

Art of criticism

I wonder if this is a societal defect but I find most of us being very sensitive to criticism ; be it in any context- individual ,community ,state or nation. Even if accidentally or indirectly someone points our flaws or something they don't approve of, we defend in a second without assessing even tad bit if it may or may not be right in any way. But why is it such a big deal. What if we have flaws? What if someone doesn't approve of our opinions /actions ? We could ponder and correct ourselves if needed and move on. Why this erratic need to defend ourselves all the time? Not just that, even if it is a government we support politically or a particular Khan in Bollywood we love ,we tend to blindly support and jump on every other person who gets critical. 

Although I do agree it's not always about whom criticism is targeted at and how it is accepted, it's also about how someone criticizes. Most times it reduces to an argument winning competition which in turn results in words which don't serve the purpose. Also if the person criticising thinks too much of himself , then no one is going to care for his/her criticism. On the other hand if it is someone who has accepted their flaws and is comfortable in their own skin, they don't even let u feel they were being critical. Now that is exactly the reason why I feel that the act of being critical or criticized is an important art for any kind of intellectual brainstorming.

For something like a community or religion we should realize and accept that if there is no one to point us when we are wrong ,then we will stagnate and anything which is stagnant becomes obsolete with time. Change is inevitable and natural evolution of a society is what is going to keep it healthy.That too in a society like ours where there are too many forces pulling us in different directions, pluralism should be celebrated. It is very important to have a conducive environment so that our democracy flourishes. I earnestly wish that we would all learn to respectfully agree to disagree and realize that the whole beauty of democracy is to have the right to dissent and still peacefully co exist.

My musical life

One evening when I was 16 or so, a normal nonsensical fight with my mother made me rush into my room with a strong urge to shut the door hard. ( Only urge because if I had done in real ,it would ve dire consequences lol) I was in tears as I entered my dark room. However , just because of casual natural habit I switched on my radio before I put the lights on. And there it was.. a song playing on the radio which I had longed for months. In a fraction of second I forgot my tears and hurried to pick my writing pad and pen ; which by the way used to be always next to my radio for such emergencies. I started to pen down the lyrics of the song like some short hand expert!  😂 When the song finished I started practising the song and by then I could hardly even remember that I was crying before. Such has been my madness for music! 😃

Those days there were no internet sites or YouTube where ready lyrics or songs were available to access. Hence, I used to have books and files with lyrics of hundreds of Bollywood songs written down with utmost dedication. It's my labour of love and a  valuable treasure. Being the only child I should have felt lonely at times. But somehow a part of it was filled by few dear friends and rest by music. Music taught me to enjoy my solitude. Most of the times there is background music playing in my head for all kind of absurd situations I am forced to face.. good or bad. Like when someone is torturing me I am playing "tera emotional athyachar" or when elated I am playing "aaj me upar aasman niche" in my head. Well yes, I am pretty much self entertained. 😋 When I am low, I listen to melancholic ghazals of my favourite jagjitji and cry my heart out pushing out all the heaviness inside me finally feeling rejuvenated. It's therapy for me! I even sing myself to sleep when stressed out. If someone was to tell me I have 10 minutes left to die , I would just listen to one of my fav songs and die with peace and joy in my heart.

Not much has changed since I was 16; rather, my relationship with music has grown mature with time. Even today I collect lyrics like my 16 year old self (procedural change with technology 😁) and can't concentrate on anything until I finish learning a song which I badly want to. This madness for music makes my normal life crazily special and worth living.

Glad to have a prized possession which can never leave my side and will accompany me forever!  
😇

Sairat!!

I have so many pending half written posts but this one had to come first because of the mad urge to write about it.. Sairat!! For people who dont know about it.. it's an awesome Marathi movie breaking all records ; for who know.. yes! I finally watched it.😇

For a movie buff the most thrilling experience is when you fall in love with a movie. It's like the feeling of first love all over again when you expand every moment with your beloved and live it again and again .. 😋  we mad movie buffs reminisce every bit of that 3 hour experience and relive it.

For starters I have never seen protagonists so real.. a girl who is not slim or fair but the way most of the population of that geographical area actually is. She even has a 'bold' scene where after she realizes her love for a guy, she shamelessly stares at him in the class (which normally is  considered as a man's fundamental right). Well that's what is bold in real sense and not a bikini clad heroine. Watching that scene had me in splits and left a deep urge in me to go back to college and  make a man blush like that lol 😂The director himself expressed in an interview that the "kam kapdewali" bold heroine is a man's fantasy  and women are running a wrong race..😂 True that!

The movie addresses a very prevalent social evil -honour killing. Few days back I watched a documentary where a mother who had lost her daughter said it's obvious that when a daughter marries out of her will ,the men in the family have every right to be enraged and kill her( mind you it was same caste) .That had really appalled me. We speak of women empowerment emotionally physically financially and so on. But in another part of the same society there are places where a woman is not entitled to have a will of her own, forget following it. In Sairat the girl is bold enough to ride a royal enfield and has the guts to boss over ten men at once (in a small village) ,but when she falls for a guy of lower caste her world turns upside down. Well, I fail to understand why in our society the "izzat" of a family is enclosed in a daughter's vagina and why not in the son's so called balls !!

What the film very effectively portrays is the play of power politics and caste politics in a small village of India. A boy slaps his teacher for stopping him from speaking on his phone inside the class because he is from the most powerful family in the village. His father even compliments him saying that the boy has inherited his grandfather's rage. This kind of upbringing of men happens in real and until this happens there will always be men whose ego is insatiable and who will have a compulsion to enforce it on their women. This in turn is obviously going to lead to evils like honour killing.

Altogether Sairat was an enriching cinematic but earthy experience with an insight to realities of our society accompanied with the thrill of a great love story! This one is going to be one of my favourites forever! 😀

Sense vs sensational

As already obvious I am a huge movie buff and love to read books and articles on how a film is conceptualised ,written, cast ,shot ,edited ; how an actor prepares or a cinematographer visualizes ; what is the director's vision and things which are really about the craft. But such articles are really not even 1% of what media writes about cinema. Most of the promotional interviews too have the (ironically) path breaking questions like how it is to work with each other or a funny incident on sets. Lol😂  I understand paparazzi is interested in celebrities and their personal lives. All of us are curious to some extent. But how much is fine?  We find articles ranging from Salman's nephew to who is doing who, star kids participating in a school competition to even how some star kid has a hot girlfriend. Recently Kangana-Hrithik issue was blown so much that a famous daily had a full page displaying  personal mail information with important words highlighted! How ridiculous is that! As individuals we always fear being judged for what we are. But when it's about celebrities it doesn't take even a full minute to form an opinion. It's also about  media sensationalism where there is no word called 'neutrality' .I feel saddened by such humongous media attention on a frivolous issue. Forget cinema, even if there is a serious debate in Parliament, its reported as how someone gave it back to someone else or how the former shut up the latter as if its happening in a rohit shetty/prabhu deva movie where dialogue-baazi happens between the hero and villain to prove who is stronger. We absolutely fail to have a rational debate. If a celebrity gave any statement against popular opinion, time is not spent to counter what he/she said but on how he doesn't have the right to have that opinion. I just wish that so called increasing literacy rate over the years has some actual effect on how we understand democracy, or atleast on the basic etiquettes of having a meaningful debate!!

I know there exists a whole community which craves for sensible  journalism be it any field. It's visible every now and then on social media. Thanks to internet that we atleast have a space to appreciate and encourage good work. Some hope!!

When life sucks..

Few days ago I had so much to write. My thoughts were flowing incessantly and it was difficult for me to pin down a certain thing among many in my head. Then suddenly came a string of failures in my life. What was definite according to me became a fantasy in a fraction of second. It's painful to deal with failure when you know it's your fault, atleast partially. But its mind numbing when you are not even responsible for it. It is challenging  already to convince people that you deserve success but to maintain the self confidence that you are still worthy is the bigger challenge in a crisis. So with the state of mind of a tragedy movie and the melancholy feel of jagjit singh songs in my head ,my thoughts were in a never ending abyss when I saw the interview of one of the few individuals I really tremendously look up to -Anurag Kashyap !

This brilliant man at the starting of his career had made 3 films but were not releasing due to censorship for several years. But he made it through all that and gave us Black Friday, Gulaal, Dev D, Gangs of wasseypur. I am not much a fan of dark films and sometimes can't even handle his way of portraying violence, but I am a great admirer of his cinema and his undying passion for it. Last year ,he had given us Bombay velvet - his dream project for a decade with a massive budget never attempted by him before, which later happened to become a commercial flop. Well,worst part didn't end there. Along with loosing his money and a part of his confidence this man was surrounded by an industry which was sadistically happy about it. But instead of sulking in it ,he found his flaws soon, accepted it and is already prepared to showcase his next venture this year. What made this happen was that he didn't let the failure suck him up inside.

Similar phase comes in everyone's life. When you hit rock bottom you really don't ve anything to loose. All that needs to be done is that you shouldn't let those negative draining thoughts to pull you down and let them sink and drown you, but just go ahead and believe in yourself no matter what. Keep doing what you want to do. One day or the other the world will notice and applaud ! Even if not , you will be peaceful and happy!  😃

Me vs society

Remember my post about life being a quadratic equation? Well from few days my mind is going round and round finding solutions for one such complicated equation of my life.

Meanwhile it was mothers day yesterday and it made me think about my complicated but beautiful relationship with my mother. I have been the focus of her world for years now. She raised to me to be an independent person with enough freedom to create my own set of thoughts and beliefs. Often we don't agree, major reason being that we belong to different worlds and our perceptions are most times different if not opposite. I am a pure sagitarrian guarding my freedom at every occasion possible and she tries to put the free spirit I am into the frame of society. Our priorities mainly differs when it's about individual vs society. I can see her point too , since i do agree that certain rules are very much needed to bind and maintain a stability of sorts in the society. We are all social beings and societal approval is needed for a peaceful co existence. But does it guarantee inner peace ? If not then what's more important?

Coming to think of it , all our decisions are mostly directly proportional to either the importance we give to what we believe is right or what society upholds as right. We are often like pendulums dwindling between these two extremes trying to find our ground somewhere in the middle. Its a fact that we are entities of this whole and if we change, the society changes too. But this constant evolution is a very slow process. Therefore, trying to be the change we want to be in the transformation phase becomes the hardest part of being a part of the society.