Tuesday, May 29, 2007

Movies

Movies, especially the Indian variety, have the nicest of endings. Ten minutes before the climax, everything is chaos. The girl is almost going to get married to the villain who has through the most machiavellian of means managed to convince the girl that he is the one that she should be marrying and not her true love who only used her as a point of leverage to further his own self-interest. I wonder if the heroines in the movies watch hindi movies. If they did, they'd know how to tell the villain apart from true loves. But for some strange reason, the women in movieland do not watch movies. The truth probably lies with a letter which is in the possession of some sanyasi somewhere who does not have the transportation to come to the location of the wedding. But of course, a dog, a snake and an elephant who are all friends of the hero and heroine (they were befriended during the 2 weeks when the hero and heroine stayed in the jungle to hide from all the bad people) manage to wheedle the letter from the sanyasi with consummate ease and double back to the log cabin where the hero is being held captive (the elephant smashes the log cabin down and all the wood splinters fall miraculously away from the hero. To make sure all contingencies have been taken care of, the elephant smashes the log cabin in which the villain's handymen are staying. This time though, the wood falls right on the thugs and manages to handicap all of them. ) The hero, the snake, the dog and the elephant then go back to the mantap (running, with the snake overtaking them), when the villain is *still* seconds away from tying the knot. Chairs are thrown, flowers are shed, coconuts get broken, words are exchanged- no one knows what's happening. In the end everyone sees the truth. Suddenly the mantap's all ready for a marriage again. Chairs are back in place. Flowers disappear from places they are not meant to be. Coconuts self seal and repair themselves. We don't know how all this gets done- it's never shown. And the boy and the girl get married and live happily ever after. The villain either turns a new leaf and becomes a priest or goes to jail (when he comes out 20 years later, he will seek revenge .He'll try and get his son married to the daughter of the blessed couple who, of course, unaware of all this, is playing with the dog, the elephant and the snake).


Pardon the long detour. But I love them. I love how honesty and sincerity and love and devotion always wins. I love how justice is meted out fairly. I love how all the bad men get punished and the good men get retributed. But most of all, I love how everything comes together in the last ten minutes of the movie. They say art imitates life. I wonder if such things happen in real life too. Hmm. It'd be nice if it did. I'd take irrational events and crazy co-incidences any day if it means happiness. I'd like a little bit of melodrama in my life too. It's fun apparently.

Monday, May 21, 2007

desire, destiny

It's a strange habit with me. I tend to remember where I first came across a word. The word cul-de-sac for instance, I first saw in an english lesson about a cellist. The word "peculiar" , I read about in a story called "the peculiar horse". Humbug of course is from wizard of Oz- well- just to give you an idea.

A senior of mine had written an article about herself in a school magazine, in which she described how similar she was to her father. "Maybe it's genes", she said. I wondered if she'd spelled it wrongly. Eventually, my mom explained what genes were. I remember being overwhelmed. The concept of a gene was "cool" to say the least. I'd been told so many times that I looked like my mom, but had teeth like my dad, but spoke like my dad's granny, and had the obstinacy of mom's mom and what not. The idea that one tends to take after relatives wasn't knew. But the fact that there was a whole scientific principle (like gravity) was too good to be true. No one had ever spoken about genes before. I thought this senior of mine was absolutely brilliant and smart. And I felt so grateful to her and that article of hers and the weird game of chance that gets played so that you're so bored reading your own article in the magazine over and over again that you decide to read a few others' as well and in doing so manage to discover the concept called a gene.

Almost immediately my life felt more complete. I couldn't bear to think of the possibility that I might have just gone through my entire life without knowing what a gene was. Oh how horrid that would have been. And oh how lucky I was not to have been subjected to such a fate.
Weirdly enough, today as I complete graduation, for the past four years, academics has been mostly about genes. Well (supposed to be. What it turned out to be is a very one sided debate about the system having botched the entire thing up and making sterile life-science/chemical hybrids out of us_

I dunno why I thought of this, but its just one of those ironical things about life(???). I'd like to use a less ostentatious word than life, but for now I'll let that be. It's just funny how things turn out. One day I didn't know what a gene was. A decade later, we're being told genes control every damn thing. I guess, I eventually would've come across the word- to say the least.
If I were given infinite opportunities to change certain instances of my life, and see how things turn out, one of the things I'd do is to make sure I didn't read that article- just to see if it would've actually mattered at all.
Somehow, I believe it would've.


PS
Very pointless article. But right now I'm sitting and reading crap in this subject called industrial management. Tomorrow I'm supposed to write things such as this
"The function of a purchasing manager is to make sure supplies are bought from the right place, for the right price, at the right amount, in the right quantity and quality"
And if you're thinking, what's so bad about that ?
I also have to go and explain the following
" If purchasing is not done properly, then items will be bought from the wrong place, for the price, at the wrong time, for the wrong quantity and quality"
Because it wasn't so obvious in the first line.
And even then the fellow correcting my paper will sit and wonder "umm... so what ???"
And then one writes a rather tragic story about how, goods will suffer, so standard of living will decline, and how people will start to get frustrated and will start to rebel, which will result in bloodshed and the extinction of human species, when a small dinosaur egg somewhere will finally hatch and put its tiny brain to more dignified purposes such as eat, sleep and reproduce instead of fighting like barbarians.
AND THE GUY IS STILL NOT CONVINCEDl!!!!!!!
WHY???
Because I used the word bought. Not purchase. You see... his answer key indicated purchase as a key word. Not buy/bought/obtain something in return for monetary value.
Its criminal.
Gah!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Bye.