Fly in the eye

A striking moment occurred to me yesterday when I was watching something beautiful and imaginative on the screen. The image does not escape me yet. It has lingered on ever since. It was the image of the eyes of a dying horse and of the tiny flies hovering over it. Death was waiting to embrace the animal and flies to eclipse the eyes, but he was still breathing on. His eyes were dozing off never to open again.

There were other some very touching moment through the 2 hour long film called “Waltz With Bashir”. I am sure many of you have seen this film and agree to what I am about to say. This film takes you through the broken images of the lost memory of a war soldier in Israel. Although the film revolves around this character but the theme is essentially war. What is most striking about the film is the freshness of the story and psychological element around it. It depicts brutality of the war yet avoids direct narrative. Hence the overall effect is quite sublime and profound.

This is animation at its best. You cannot make out the fine line between the real and the surreal and the film travels between these two genres very effortlessly. You hardly notice the shift. Sometimes you are transported to the war scene with guns and flares, and interspersed between these are dreamlike experiences owing the complex nature of human mind and how it reacts to warlike situations. There are also some very interesting almost scientific insights into the minds of humans especially during trauma and war.

The film is very brisk in the narrative but never hurries on to you. It pauses to ponder when it should doesn’t drag on when it shouldn’t. The film gets over in under 100 minutes and ends up telling a whole lot of things about life, war, people and crime, mostly through those striking images. It is an irony that whatever you can achieve with animation can hardly ever been imagined other genres yet there are very few experiments in animation in most of the big film industries. Agreed that you see a lot of animation work but most of it carries a stereotype of big entertainment value rather than serious and solemn cinema. If the success of the cinema is measured by how much it moves you and whether is it able to give you something which is unique in nature and very distinctive observation about life then this film has be of a great value to the world of cinema and viewers.

बढे चलो

एक बार फिर वही हुआ जिसका अंदेशा था
झारखण्ड में खंडित जनादेश।
फिर सिलसिले शुरू होंगे,
खरीद फरोख्त और सीटों के बन्दरबाट के
फिर मारकाट मचेगी

अन्याय के नारे गूंजेंगे फिर शांत हो जायेंगे,
ताकि आगे की कार्रवाई शुरू हो
कुछ जेबें गरम हों,
कुछ घरों की आग से

जल जंगल जमीं सब जायज है
मगर हर जायज चीज़ जरूरी नहीं
जिसको आगे बढ़ना हो वो रास्ता खुद निकाले
खुद को जलाये या दुनिया को
इतनी दूरदर्शिता लेकर सोचना बेकार है
आज में जीने में ही भलाई है

उद्योग ही विकास है
उनकी जरूरत सर्वोपरि,
क्यूंकि वे समाज का स्तर ऊँचा किये हुए हैं
वे हमारे देश की बैसाखी हैं
उनके विषय में बहस निरर्थक है,
इसीलिए कुछ समाज के उत्तराधिकारियों का
उनके इशारों पर खेलना अनुचित नहीं,
जो वादे किये जा चुके हैं,
उनसे पीछे नहीं हटा जा सकता,
अनदेखा नहीं किया जा सकता।

आदिवासी क्या हैं ?
उस सभ्यता के पद चिन्ह,
जिन्हें परिवर्तन की हवाओं से मिटना होगा,
और आखिर वो भी तो गतिशील समाज हैं,
जिसमें कुछ भी ठहरा नहीं रह सकता।

यह जरूरी नहीं कि
सारी मानव जाती सिर्फ जल जंगल जमीं की उपासना में जुट जाये
और भी मक़ाम हैं काबिल-ऐ-हासिल

जो जा चुका

वो अक्सर कल मैं ही जीती थी
अपनी आज की अनुभूतियों को,
किसी कल के लिये समेटती थी
खुद को आज की बारिश में इसीलिए भिगोती थी,
ताकि कल उसका मज़ा हासिल कर सके।

हर आनंद, हर चुटकी को इस तरह संजोती थी,
मानो कल के श्रोता को बखान की तैयारी में हो
आज की लहर को,
कल बन जाने पर अविरल निहारती थी
जीवन के सफ़र को,
समृति बन जाने पर गुजारती थी।

उसके मन-सरोवर में,
कल के कई चलचित्र मौजूद थे,
जिन्हें वह उत्सुकता से सुनाती थी
जो बीत गया स्वर्णयुग था,
ऐसी उसकी मान्यता थी

Empire of the Sun

My writings tend to be very autobiographical and direct in its prose. I begin to delve more into myself and more hidden areas of my mind get illuminated. Thus begins a journey into an alien yet distinctly familiar land which never seems to run out of surprises.

I few hours ago I was watching a film called as “Empire of the Sun”. The story is about the life of a boy who is caught in the crossfire between China and Japan during the Japanese takeover of China in 1941. The film like any other Spielberg film doesn’t waste a single moment to move the story ahead and the narrative progresses at a brisk speed. Yet there are instances when the film allows you to take a pause to reflect on the dreams and aspiration of the boy around whom the story revolves. The film starts portraying the realities of slow but steady collapse of China’s civil structures during the Japanese invasion, even as the British empire is shrinking rapidly and how the whole country, especially Shanghai, becomes a hostage into the hands of mighty Japanese forces. This sets a perfect stage of parallel narratives, one that of a military war and other an emotional battle fought by a little boy. As the history has unfolded, we all have witnessed how China has made Japan apologise for every single war crime of those times.

The film is a very direct narrative of the dreams and triumph thereof of an English boy whose father was a successful business man in the pre world war China. He was filthy rich and hence famous with some very important connections in the world of politics and business. Although it was common knowledge that Japan and China would soon enter into a war given the Japanese fascist ambitions during Second World War, no one actually believed that Japan would sabotage the social and political fabric of China so completely.

During the pre war scenes the film also tries to portray how British almost lived in a parallel China created to suit their comfort, stateliness and opulence. We see some very pleasing images of the British upper class enjoying Christmas together, with their sumptuous dinners and fancy dresses. We also see the images of a subservient China out to serve the British Also, there is the other part of China which is marginalised, underprivileged, and hungry, with its dark and narrow lanes where you cannot see beyond the next turn.

We see all this through the eyes of a school boy with a curious mind aspiring to become an air pilot. This film is as much about the war as it is about the little dreams of the boy. As the story progresses, his passion for flying seems to grow on him, as if everything around him seems to scheme up to turn his dreams into reality. As the music of his life, as it plays around him in the form of his little pleasures of seeing his small aspirations coming true, seems to strike a melody, the chord suddenly snaps. You are thrown in the din of utter poverty and ruthlessness of concentration camps. But the dreams of that boy still linger on and somehow life doesn’t want to deprive him of those little spells of charm when he sees his object of dreams, the fighter plane.

And this is where lies the filmmakers’ biggest triumph, the innocent belief of a boy, which never seems to renounce his aspirations in the face of doom and hopelessness. Despite many flaws in the film itself, you feel a divine touch of the indomitable spirit of life in the form of a tiny hope which never gets shaken by the blizzards of war.

Hedda Gabler

वह उसे बेहद चाहती थी,
इसीलिए माफ़ कर न सकी।
जानते हुए भी कि,
उस रिश्ते की मौत निश्चित है,
साथ उसके इन्साफ कर न सकी।

इर्ष्या में जल जल कर,
हालात को बद से बदतर बनाती रही,
योजनाबद्ध तरीके से अपनी उल्फत का,
रेशा रेशा उखाड़ती रही।

वो उस कोरे कुहासे में,
उफक की रोशनियाँ खोजती रही,
खून से लिखे अल्फाजों को,
अपने ही खून से पोछती रही।

उस पुराने प्रेम को पा जाना चाहती थी,
उसे इस जहाँ से कहीं दूर,
किसी अनोखे क्षितिज पर,
पहुँच जाना चाहती थी।

लेकिन वो उसकी कुर्बत पा न सकी,
तो उसे उफनती लपटों में झोंक दिया,
जिस तलवार पे बाकी थे यादों के छींटे उसके,
उसे ख़ुद के सीने में भोंक दिया।

सिर्फ़ मैं

शब्दों की कोख में,
पनपता मेरा संसार
समय की शिलाओं पर,
कुरेदी हुई कुछ लकीरें
और कुछ टेढे मेढे आकार

Birth of an idea

Life is all about dedication and sacrifice. It presents its beauty only to those who are prepared even willing to toil for perfection in whatever they do. This pursuit in itself is endless, because when you reach to a level of expertise, you raise your bar too. Man is a part of nature, rather man is nature. Therefore, man’s capabilities are as endless and boundless as the nature we live in. This is only natural, has always been since time immemorial. To touch your inner-self and find happiness in things you like to do and excruciating pain in things you don’t like is as natural as being able to find only a certain kind of food edible and certain others not.

These ideas along with several other fleeting yet profound ones zipped through my mind and ripped everything apart. And something had changed inside me, never to be un-done. As if something that was burning inside suddenly burst apart and commotion prevailed thereafter for a long while. My mind went through twists and turns, topsy-turvy, where ideas were choc-a-bloc and I was trying to memorize everything.

When, Where and Why did this happen?

While I was edging on my seat inside a packed auditorium where a play known as “Kafka – a chapter” had just begun and someone was yet to make an appearance on stage. All I could feel was an endless musical piece, which started slowly and penetrated into my heart so deeply that it will reside there for the rest of my life. Suddenly, the light on stage began to change, and so sublime was the change that you could barely notice it. But your eyes can’t fool your mind. It was obvious that light had to follow sound, not the other way, since sound reaches mind faster through ears than light through eyes. The stage is half as much lit as you would want it to be and suddenly an image flashes on the screen at the rear most end of the stage, momentarily disorienting you. But you regain fast, it’s just a film. The film runs for about 60 seconds, each second taking an hour. You can’t blink your eyes. A door opens within the space of the film-narrative going on the screen. Lights on, the first character yanks himself on to the stage out of thin air and starts yelling for Kafka. Where did the screen go? No where. And this was the moment when all those thoughts ripped apart my mind, thoroughly and completely.