burnt and bitter

 Chapter 1: Burnt and bitter

Some fifty fuckers will read this. Why spend months on something with such dismal readership? There, that was the reason I don’t feel like writing.

But then. I’m forty three and it’s time for my mid-life crises. Judd Apatow has done This is Forty. Go watch the film. It has Paul Rudd in it.

I hate how America has fucked the world with Elon Musk kind of values. The Mothers of Invention have done a whole double album on this. That too on debut. Freak Out! was released a good twelve years before I was born. 

I’m terribly bitter about how I’m such a fine artist and no one gives a fuck about it. That circles back to my midlife crises. 

I abhor the Indian startup ecosystem, the PEs and the VCs and the dudes in jeans and black crew necks. But that circles back to how America has fucked the world.

And I’m not talented enough, that like Larry and Jerry, I make a “show about nothing”. 

Nothing much to write about, is it?

---------------------------------

Now then, it’s time to write my fourth.

unMind - my third book is out!

 

unMind is a graphic retelling of the powerful teachings of two great mystics of modern India - Ramana Maharishi (1879 - 1950) and Ramesh Balsekar (1917-2009). Sri Ramana and Ramesh taught the path of non-duality (or advaita) as a way to Self-realization.

Non-duality is a path of knowledge that urges us to enquire into the nature of our existence. According to advaita, turning inward to find our true identity is the path to enlightenment. Unlike other spiritual methods, the teachings of an advaita saint don't include elaborate practices or rituals, instead the focus is on asking who we truly are ('Who am I?') and realizing (via experience and knowlegde) the absolute truth that's instantly available to anyone who's willing to seek.

Ramana Maharishi is considered by many modern spiritual thinkers to be the greatest sage of the 20th century. However, not many people today know about him or his teachings. I realized that readers (and seekers) would find most of the books written on him to be archaic and inaccessible and that's how unMind was born. I believe bringing these spiritual insights in an accessible, visual format can be of great benefit to the serious seeker as well as those who are intrigued by mysticism and spirituality.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54862628-unmind

https://www.amazon.in/gp/product/B08FH7NDN2/

I heard the news today, oh boy...

Madras Cafe (2013)

Rating 2.5/5.0

Where 5.0 is what Shoojit should have tried to emulate

Madras Café is an attempt to analyze an event that shook the Indian psyche – Rajiv Gandhi’s killing in 1991. Unfortunately, it falls short and you’re left wondering if that is all there’s to it. When espionage, conspiracy, twisted diplomacy, power politics and counter terrorism are your subjects, it’s nearly impossible to take a simplistic, straight line approach to storytelling – the film tries to do just that and fails miserably. It can be that the director’s intention was to describe the RAW operation in Sri Lanka but that too seems marred by the script holding back from telling the bare truth, instead preferring to tread a safe path that almost borders on subtle sycophancy.

Everyone lived out their fantasy in Madras Cafe except the viewer. Piyush Pandey got to play Cabinet Secretary, Siddharth Basu the Head of RAW, John Abraham a top Spy (knock yourself out with a heavy book before he utters the momentously trite line "I couldn't save our Prime Minister"), Nargis Fakrhi a war correspondent (she tries hard but ends up looking like a class monitor who'll write your name on the blackboard if you talk too much) and Shoojit Sircar a spy filmmaker. Everyone had fun except me. 

This is the definition of a cardboard film - cardboard characters, cardboard actors, cardboard script, cardboard sycophancy. The only chap whose character had some limited appeal was the hitherto unknown Prakash Belawadi who plays RAW agent Bala Krishnan. Unfortunately for the viewer, Bala Krishnan kills himself early on, apparently unable to take the stress of holding this cardboard film together. 

Watch it just to hear John Abraham say, “I couldn’t save out Prime Minister”

I wrote a book and it's called THE VIRGINS

and you can order it online on Flipkart & uRead & Bookadda

It'll hit the bookstores by the first week of May. yeah!

Imagine a world with a trillion Rembrandts

Moonrise Kingdom (2012)

Rating 4.75/5.0
where 5.0 is my favorite Wes Anderson film

I could have been a great filmmaker. You would say - Yeah! We could all have been great filmmakers. And my response to that is - SHUT UP, WILL YA, THIS IS MY FUCKING REVIEW!

I scoff at films made today -- I think they are crap and I believe I could do better if I had the chance. I know the truth but I like to live in a make believe world -- that keeps me sane. Till now I have been quite successful at living with the delusion that I'm a filmmaker in exile...and to make it more authentic I have made it a point not to use my video camera even once in the last 3 years. 

There are very few filmmakers who can humble this vain Antonioni in me. Wes Anderson is one of them. When it comes to his films, I find it very hard to say - "Hey, I could have done that with a 1 year diploma from a good film school" I want to suffer from a remotely possible delusion and thinking that I can make a film like Wes is not even remotely possible. Why? Because Wes Anderson films are not films, they are a trillion paintings flipping, floating, flying about with beautiful music playing in the background. Every scene is a perfect balance of color, emotion and movement -- it's fragile, it's ethereal and it's impossible to predict -- every moment in the film stands proudly as a testament of what movies can do if you could think, hear and imagine like Wes Anderson. 

Watch Moonrise Kingdom. After you're done, spend a couple of hours staring at the ceiling thinking about the film -- it might lead you to a world that's better than the one we live in. 


Imdb link here

the first film

my son will watch will be this one....because he doesn't have a choice ;-) and because it's the greatest comedy ever made...

He came at me with his knee! His sociopathic knee!

Adam's Apples (2005)

Rating 4.5/5.0
Where 5.0 is where it all started

This film makes me want to go back to the days when I would sit on my bed with a remote in hand, in front of a TV I had bought on 12 EMIs, watching 5 films a day on weekends, 2 films a day on weekdays -- the time when I gaped endlessly at films made by Bresson, Tarantino, Fellini, Almodavar, Seijun Suzuki and many others of their ilk; and every film they made stunned me, made me stop, made me think, made me wonder -- how could they create something so flawless, so timeless. Those were the days man. And these are the days too. Those days I was receiving the best...now I'm creating something as best as I can. And receiving right is like the foundation of building something good. What else is there to life: either you receive what others have made or you create something -- and if you need to do these then why not do your best -- why not watch, read, listen to and meet whatever you think is the best and try to create whatever you can, as best as you can. Life is too short for the mediocre, the ordinary.

Wonderful film this. I think very soon I need to go back to a cycle of receiving in order to create something new, maybe even something flawless.

IMDB link here