Post Mammootty [God] Utopia for Cinema

This post may be late relatively.

In a couple of recent Mammootty films in Malayalam, his characters have been projected as God's representatives. I have not watched most of these movies, since I felt there were better ways to torture myself. So, I can't attempt a review of these movies. My point is different.

God stands for good values. Thus, marketing a character as God's representative implies that he stands for the good values.

From others' reviews, judging the trailors, and recalling the few movies that I have actually seen, the good values in these movie should be read as "good old" values -- traditional, conservative, religious, moral, anti-feminist and so on.

First question: why the movies focus on values? It is due to the the modern times, which many consider evilsome: loss of human values, social values, commodity values, increasing corruption and rape and so on. So, basically, these movies attempt to restore the values by depicting good characters who act unbelievable ethical standards and thus represent (or even surprise)God. The hope is that these characters will inspire people to reflect and change themselves and thus will create a good future.

Second question: Why Mammootty? This is easy. Mammootty represents the male-dominanating values of Malayali society. He is old enough to be considered "mature" and is an icon of both old and young.

First irony: Mammootty [Mohan Lal, too] was caught by the income tax department two years ago for evading tax. Period.

Second irony: The reason for moral degradation of the contemporary society is not because we don't have inspiring stories. The reason is ingrained in the economic changes and reforms. The advent of captialism. Values are not important, but the price is, and it soares high. As high as it would seem that an average citizen could never attain that height.

Third irony: The solution of having godly characters will not produce any positive effect. That only will sustain the fantasy of the society that old and traditional was good. No economic reforms are suggested.

Third question: What is the possible reaction through cinema for a positive change? Perhaps, a [Zizekian] utopian solution is to sign up a very young, the gen-next, actor, who has a completely freak-star image [like Asif Ali or Dulqar Salman or Fahad Fazil (All Muslims? LOL)] for a movie in which the character face the despair due to loss of values, etc., quite similar to those in Mammootty movies, and tries to solve it seriously and ethically, as a representative of God and Old values. In other words, replace Mammootty with one of such guys as these as a God's representative.

Fourth question and forth irony: Does the commercial value of Malayalam cinema care about any of that discussed above? No!

Old Man Insights

You might have noticed that I am in a spree of posting here. All these posts are connected. They belong to the same stream of thinking. Where are they taking me? I swear I don't know.

I have noticed that my posts have been getting ever bigger. I have to be brief in an Internet age. 

But writing needs freedom. I try different styles, without much concerning myself about the length of the post. However, I may not be very good in the styles yet.

The writing style of this post is inspired by many posts in Evan Williams' new writing platform Medium; a style that is very concise. Recall Mr. Williams is the creator of blogger! And twitter, too!

Here we go.

Of late, I am having a strange thought: how would a 90 years old man or woman would like to recount his or her life?

I don't want to ask them directly. I want to imagine it myself. To imagine is more pleasurable! 

I find it more difficult to imagine like an old woman than an old man. Hence my attempt here, now, is to imagine like an old man.

Perhaps, he wants to look at his life by milestones. Like, by the age of 10 I started playing football; I was 18 when I went for my first job; I was married by 26; I became a father by 28, a grandfather by 55; and so on.

Human memory distorts the facts and one always remember nonlinearly. So, the old man would have some connecting dots that are his milestones and a lot of associated details connecting every dot with each other in complex and multiple ways.

Everything is connected in life. Everything happening influences every other thing happening. 

So, being 90 or more, the old man can see all his milestones and perceive all the connections at the same time. That gives him a massive insight to his life, and, perhaps, to human life in general! That is one of the biggest assets one can have, isn't that?

I envy the old man, since I lack that kind of richness now!

I love the way Sean Connery and Clint Eastwood look at their characters James Bond and Dirty Harry, respectively. The attitude is that: Oh! That character worked at that time; I cannot do the same character now; If anyone else wants to do it has to be different, suitable for the times; I had my nice time and now it is gone and it is absolutely OK.

WOW!

If only I could have such a full understanding of my life! 

Now, I can remember and connect the dots in my past. But I am always baffled by the uncertainty of the future and hence feel incomplete and discontent.

Final thought: If just a 90 year old man owns this kind of riches, what a man with immense knowledge in the history of humanity -- the likes of Umberto Eco and Slavoj Zizek -- would possess! The (almost) entire history of humanity! And they don't have to be 90 years old for that! That is so much of insight, man. So much. Massiver than the massive!

Galaxies Apart, Remembering the Earth

Sitting inside my room, its door and windows closed, I am feeling that I am sitting inside a closed box isolated completely from the external world. There is not even a ventilator to this room. Inside here, in this moment, I am currently coexisting with numerous micro-organisms and a few small insects, which include three or four mosquitoes whose music I can hear. Some of these micro-organisms live inside my body. Among all these living beings, who incidentally constitute my society, perhaps, I am the only one who is aware of its own existence; I may be the only one with a thinking mind -- intelligence. Science says so. Who knows. I am a skeptic, always, in almost everything. Kindly, excuse me for that.

It is completely quiet here; a dead silence akin to a cemetery in the darkest hour prevail here. The only sound that I can hear is the rhythmic rustle of my breath. And a generic humming noise coming from an unknown source -- perhaps, from the external world, but I cannot judge. Listening deeply, and listening intently with my mind, I also hear, at least I feel I hear, a humming sound emanating from my head. A ceaseless sound, which threatens the peace of my mind and the beauty of this moment. This moment is nice: to stay away from all the human existence, thus to break away from the absurdity of existence. Inside this room, I do not encounter within me the need for a meaning for my existence, unlike the way I feel while living in the external world. Here I feel calm, silent, and protected by the definiteness of this existence.

Slowly, my mind fall into the great depth of forgetfulness. The ocean is calm, but dangerously fathomless. ............................................................

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I do not know how long I stayed like that. I was not asleep. My mind was not at rest. It was, and still is, reverberating, beyond my control. I can't help it. I hear imaginary sounds; I have strange visions; Once in a while memories from the past haunt me. They come together to form sequences of images, quite like an imaginary movie, in front of my inner eyes. They don't have any meaning. I cannot interpret them. Yet, they haunt me, because they are seemingly real, belonging to my distant past. Of many of them, I don't understand why they arise within me now. They don't have any significance. No importance at all. Yet they haunt me, because they are real. They are real, but distorted and nonlinear. They haunt me because, although distorted, they are real.

There was this boy, myself, years ago, I don't know how many years. Perhaps he was just five years old. Or, maybe, just six. His old grannies, aunts of his mother, there were two of them, both of them almost blind, one of them stooping forward due to age and weakness, asked him to take them to the doctor's house across the road. He was scared. For, he knew that he could not manage that kind of a responsibility. That was huge for him. He said, ask my mother or my aunt. They replied, no, you can, my child. With a lot of hesitation and fear, he took them to the doctor, for he loved them and did not want to disobey. They had to cross the road, with relatively no traffic at all if I compare with the contemporary times. He was cautious. He looked around. Both his grannies, whom he loved as he loved the god, were almost blind, one of them stooping forward due to age and weakness. He took them to the other side, firmly holding the hand of one of theirs, and she holding the hand of the other. He sighed deeply on the other side of the road, a sigh of consolation. The grannies met the doctor. He stayed outside the doctor's room, looking out at the road. One or two buses passed. Seeing that his mind started getting agitated out of anxiety. How would he take the grannies back to the other side? When the grannies came out, he saw one more bus passing on the road. He was defeated fully. His mouth was salivating, his heart fluttering fast. Oh my god! What will I do? He lost all his hope and faith. Asking the grannies to sit there in the doctor's waiting room, he rushed home. He could cross the road, that was not difficult. He called his aunt, who was surprised and also perplexed to hear the news. The anxiety he felt that day is still alive within my mind. I can still feel it with its full intensity. Those days are gone. Those grannies disappeared from the earth. Yet, the memories are haunting me, but I don't know why!

The silence has deepened. I am alone in this room, isolated from the human society. But there are still things in here that connect me with the external world. The old iron-made shelf; the cot; the bed; the cloths; the electric lamp and fan; and so on. Yet, I don't know why I feel it so strange to sit here alone. I don't know why I feel like living galaxies away from the human world.

Oh! galaxies! Have you gone to the end of this world?

There was this road. The same old road. And there was this gate. Opening directly to the road. Behind the gate, there was this house, a big house, now lost to the eternity, but then surrounded by plants and trees and empty lands. One day, this boy, myself again, when I don't remember, went outside the gate to see buses and bicycles and auto-rickshaws and, very rarely, scooters passing. He was waiting for his uncles. They would bring candies for him in the evening when they come back from work. He was waiting there in a joyous mood. In those days, there was something called the joy of existence, which has been lost by now to the entire mankind, I don't know since when. There! It was quite unexpected. He was scared to death. For a few moments he did not know what he should do. In the distance, from the other side of the point where the road curved, there appeared a giant, black mass. With big ears on two sides, with a long trunk! The sight of the two long, strong tusks got the guts out of the boy. Soon he woke up from the initial shock of the moment. He was after all an animal; an intelligent monkey. He had to survive. He had an instinct for survival. He ran back behind the gate. I don't know how he managed to close the gates. He just pushed it back with all his might as he was running towards the house. He heard the gate getting closed with a loud bang behind him; that sound is still ringing in my mind. That was a domesticated elephant. His uncle could not help laughing when he saw how he ran into the house.

Memories may torture you; but they are also a bliss!

If I forget all my memories, I would be nothing, but really a dust in this universe. I lose my identity. It is like I have never been born. That intensifies the absurdity of existence.

Memories are memories. They influence you beyond your understanding of them. They don't need you to understand them. But they work in the back of your mind, always reverberating and making strange sounds and visions. Perhaps, they are haunting me because I clearly know that they belong to a lost world, a world that will never come back again.

Sitting here in isolation, undisturbed, I could feel like the god of this world. World, this closed world. Yes, I have already started feeling in that way. But, remembering what Nietzsche wrote, the stomach prevents me from continuing to live with that illusion. In some sense, the stomach brings the primary meaning to this world. The phallus and vagina, the secondary one. Like the Thomas Mann's protagonist, who was very content in leading a frugal life, reading his books and eating what he had, refusing to do any work for the external world, but whose peace of mind was slightly disturbed when he saw a beautiful women and was completely destroyed by the sight of her beautiful palm resting on her seat near him while they were inside a theatre, I am also disturbed by the reality of the emptiness of my stomach. The stomach is aching. The first thing next is to devour.

--Sandeep Palakkal, Chennai.

Of the Symbolic and the Fake, Etc.

Life changes. Everyones'. The Lonely Wanderer's too!

I finished the degree and got out of the student life. And a new life started.

That is me receiving the Ph. D. from Prof. Bhaskar Ramamurthi, the director of IIT Madras, during the 50th convocation of IIT Madras on July 19, 2013.

I joined a company in its R&D team. Becoming financially better, I started my efforts to manufacture an offspring. That was successful. A baby boy. He is now six months old and kicking. Yea, literally: if you sit near him, he will practise his front-kicks on you:) Being a father: pain and pleasure. Both at a time. Like everything else in life, but not the same. Thanks, my son -- for transforming me into a father. That changes everything. Or, many things, at least. What the heck! Why am I saying all these? If you are not yet a father, or a mother, for that matter, you will possibly not understand what I am saying. I would not understand what I was saying had I not been a father, for sure. On contrary, if you are a father or a mother, then you don't need me to tell you about it. Both ways, perhaps, this is a dead end. In case my yearning for writing takes me towards it, we will, maybe, talk about it later.

With Vijual Sandeep, on Nov 16, 2013.

We were talking about changes. Yes, sir. Changes. Working for someone is actually a pain. You spend your quality time in your office, doing your job, along with your colleagues, morning to evening. If you are lucky, you will be doing something you love. In my case, I believe I do what I love. Reading, understanding, learning, sharing, developing signal processing algorithms. I love that. I cannot say it is signal processing anymore. My beliefs during my college days have already been shattered. There is no signal processing independently in the industry. One cannot conform to that alone. One has to expand. Expand. Expand ones realm beyond ones horizon. I learn machine learning, computer vision, pattern classification and so on; a little bit of everything. Period. No more technical terms and discussions. This is my fucking personal blog. I have a separate blog to write technical things. [I always pledge that I will not use such obscene words anymore. But sometimes, I can't help it. It just comes out of my mind. Habit.]

So what we were talking is about the work life. That is no good, I claim. Because, since morning to evening, one has to do the job. Nothing else. That is what is disgusting about it. I get different kind of impulses at different times. Sometimes to do my work, some other time to read a novel, and another time to write. To write. That is to be myself. To give a release to my ever reverberating mind. Excuse me if I sound self-boasting or pompous. My mind is not great, but what I said was the truth. It is always reverberating, quite often disturbing my sleep. It is full of thoughts, sounds, visions and memories, and so on. Most of the time, it is all crap. Another most of the time, it is just pornography. How vulgar and wasteful! Rarely, it is beautiful. It is about this beautiful that I am going to talk about in a while now. 

But wait. Patience is the key to lead a normal life in this ridiculously absurd world.

Just going backward a little, again, we were talking about the work life. The lack of possibility to go with the impulse reduces my freedom and my happiness. And my [I did not want to claim this] creativity. Besides, you miss the sun and the day. You miss the life outside. I mean the nature, not boring humans. That is really a loss, I think. That is like the loss of the "real" in psychoanalytical sense. I am put in the "symbolic" inside the office and I loss the "real" of the world. Then my "imaginary" starts working. I develop fantasies in order to be happy in the "symbolic". I don't want to talk about it. I hate it. And I resist the fantasy. I try to understand the "symbolic" and the "real". I try to repress the "imaginary". Well, I don't really repress it. Thanks to my inner culture, I try to understand the "imaginary" and try to deal with it intellectually. As I wrote sometime back, a problem that is understood intellectually and came in terms with emotionally is no problem anymore.

Today, while I was coming back from the office, travelling with my friend on his bike, we were caught in the traffic jam. That's an everyday business in Chennai. We are over-crowded. My wait longed for about ten minutes. I looked above at some instant. And, I encountered the "real". As a reminder of the fake nature of the "symbolic", the "real" extended in front of my eyes, and then inside my mind. I saw the twilight of the evening slowly flourishing over the horizon. My mind felt incited by its beauty. Birds, most of which being eagles, were flying towards me from the horizon. They looked happy and delighted. They looked calm and charming. They looked free and independent. Colour is the fake nature of the world. It is through this fake characteristic, the world itself arises in front of me. The reddish-orange tinge of the twilight in the horizon, the blueness of the sky right above my head, the green shade of the top of the tree I was seeing afar and the blackness of the birds that appear as distant shadows above me. That was -- how would I fake it in words? -- beautiful.

At that moment, I became what I really was. Just a dust in this giant, vast universe. That's just how I experience the loss of identity.

My house -- read this the house that I have rented -- is clean and tidy. You can see a woman's touch in everything. That woman is me. I am man and woman. Why not? I am no fake. I am honest. I am a hermaphrodite. The ardha-nareeswara. My wife is studying in a place far away from me. My son is torturing his mother by staying with her. I live alone here, like a right-conservative (thanks to Clint Eastwood's character in Grand Torino) who fixes his own house. Self dependent. I cook my food. I enjoy cooking, though I hate what I am cooking. November is a cold month in Chennai. But this winter does not seem to be as cold as it was in 2009. Yet, it is nice to sleep in a cosy bed, under the blanket, thinking of all these things. I can sense life under my feet. My soles are cool. My toes are motionless. I feel them with my mind. The sensation moves upward. And I feel like a man and like a woman at the same time. And I don't fucking care what the sadist feminists and the masochist macho-maniacs will think about it!

--Sandeep Palakkal, Chennai, Nov 25, 2013.