What I write now is not the original words, but I put it down differently because I get the strange feeling sometimes that the CIA is scanning my weblog. OK, I am kidding, it's just my guilty conscience because I was going to beat the shit out of a certain brand of American movies in a post. Well, my annoyance has blown away, and so rationally, and in a manner not designed to intentionally provoke patriotic sentiments, I will proceed.

I just watched a horrible movie called, deceptively, “happy endings”. Do not watch it just to understand what this post is about, it will scar your soul. Basically, Lisa Kudrow gets it on with her step-brother, gets pregnant, has the baby without telling anyone about it. Years later, the parents die (their tombstone says, "don't drink and drive"), the step-brother is gay and deceives his partner's best friends to find out if their baby is his partner's baby really, Lisa herself is involved in another tale of deception which I cannot bother to write about and there is one more sub-plot included where a son deceives his father into dating a girl who is deceiving both of them to have a place to live. In the end, everything is sorted, and the last "happy dance" Lisa is dancing with her brother and she remembers herself dancing with him when they were teens, and she sees their son now grown-up looking on, and in that regretful moment you can almost see her think: if only.

I have no problem with any of the choices made in the movie. I just have a problem with the ethos behind the movie and behind this brand of film and tv-making that glorifies dysfunction. Nothing is more seductive than depression, and there is a whole saga of depressed lives hanging out on the washing-line of the film world. What to do when you're depressed, whether you're rich and have no reason to be depressed or poor and have every reason to be depressed (These are the categories they are presented in, I think both are crap): get drunk and do something stupid, get high and do something stupid, do something stupid and somehow in the end, you may be depressed but you sure had a good time because what the hell, life is pain. So when these filmmakers/ scriptwriters get ahold of the idea that there is beauty in life, their very concept of it is of twisted beauty. My sole issue is the one-sidedness of it and the seductiveness of the medium that people will start agreeing with their moment of doubt in their own power to change their lives.

You have movies that aestheticize violence, but if the filmmaker included the image of the raped, the plundered and the murdered and also tried to aestheticize that, someone would look at it and say, "Man that may look pretty but it sure is artificial." Because you know what you would feel like if that happened to you. I don't have an issue with what art does with its interpretation of life, I just notice a trend in movies that sell this as truth, that says life sucks so screw the world before you get screwed over.

On the other hand you have pop movies where romance is sold like candy and even the worst product of society looks drop-dead gorgeous in the end and has the most enviable partner on his/her arm. There's this basic inability to look at reality I think, because people are so scared of what they might see that they have to make everything beautiful or they'll just die with shame.

The last scene of American Beauty, Spacey says “I feel great”, he picks up the family photograph, someone pulls the trigger and BAM there’s Spacey’s blood on the wall. The movie ends with the idea that here was a guy whose life ended with him running high, having found his “Self”. That is still stuck in dysfunction, because his “self” was expressed at the cost of others: He was mean, he yelled, he expressed his power by denying everyone else theirs. He dominated others by sarcasm and shouting. He got his pleasure by reversing the control in his life, he simply started controlling everyone else, and that  was what his wife was driving home to tell him about – “I will not be your victim anymore!” - even though he had felt like hers for the longest time. I think he died – or more appropriately was killed by the screenwriter/director – when he was about to really lift off. When you stand up for yourself and become comfortable in your own power, you get to a place where you can learn how to be powerful gently, and that is real power. It is a power that requires nothing but can get everything at no one’s expense because it knows how to move in harmony. I could talk all night about it, but what I basically wanted to say is that there is a place that exists that these movies have stopped believing in. In looking at people at their meanest and seeing only that as reality, you are also cutting out the other extreme of human behaviour and choice, when both are equally possible and in your power to choose.

There are other foreign films that are different – they show pathos but it’s beautiful in that it glorifies the human ability to feel. Whatever the action chosen, they focus on the emotion behind it and the heart is not shut to the impact of the action. They genuinely see a beauty in living, and there is a moral code, an innocence in life that they revere. What I am trying to say is,  pain is painful, and joy is joyful and the beauty seen in anyone's life is  not in glorifying the times they made someone and themselves miserable, but simply that it was a life lived by choice and it is in every moment that your life can change because of that choice. It is the power to choose that makes all life beautiful, and why I  would not give up on any human being.

Perhaps it appears that watching these movies makes no difference to a rational person. People say things like “It’s just a movie, don’t tell me people will watch it and actually go out and rape someone.” They may not, but they may forget to consider the raped person’s point of view. They will not care about the raped person and will do nothing to prevent rape from happening to people either, because some part of them watched it and said it’s ok to watch this and do nothing. What’s more, they’ll tell you seriously, "It’s a part of life, haven’t you seen it on TV all the time?" (Anyone in the news business will tell you, what's on TV is selectively presented, because it happens to be, like anything else, a job.)

I thought American Beauty was awesome when I first saw it, I was in school. The only scene I actually stand by with now is that film Ricky Fitts made on the plastic bag dancing in the breeze. He says, "It was one of those days when it's a minute away from snowing and there's this electricity in the air, you can almost hear it. And this bag was, like, dancing with me. Like a little kid begging me to play with it. For fifteen minutes. And that's the day I knew there was this entire life behind things, and... this incredibly benevolent force, that wanted me to know there was no reason to be afraid, ever. Video's a poor excuse, I know. But it helps me remember... and I need to remember... Sometimes there's so much beauty in the world I feel like I can't take it, like my heart's going to cave in." And no one, I mean no one in the movie actually lives with that understanding. Ricky Fitts is definitely calm and detached but there is this inner joy that he is still seeking and I hope, in his movie-life, he finds is real.

...and the cops came running

The cops have come running for random things like being on the beach after midnight (always a little dicey if they’re a little drunk by that time to get through the long watch) but there was one time they came that we got running too.

 “Do you remember that time we got sloshed at Red Light? You’d got free drink coupons.”

“No... what is Red light?”

“Oh God, you deserve to be shot. That place near the MF Hussain mural... And we walked around for a bit and then we decided to go sit beside the Jai Maharashtra block letters in that grass enclosure, and a patriotic cop came running out of nowhere and chased us down the road..”

“Oh my God! – and N had his bike though I can’t imagine what he did with it”

“And then the two of them saw that crane and started climbing it but that cop came running again...”

“Hehehehe...”

“And then we lost him and you saw that guy and we started following him because you wanted to say hi, only I think he got nervous and jumped into a cab...”

“I think I did say hi...”

“And then we had nothing to do so we caught a cab to your house and watched late night VH1 until we all fell asleep on the double-bed, I don’t know how we all fit... and we still managed to make it to the 8 a.m. lecture the next day...”

I remember sitting on the curb outside the building that night, listening to Coldplay’s Yellow for the first four times in my life as I couldn’t turn it off. It was the perfect listen because you could soar with it in your spiralled highness.

*

I think the things we did were obliquely wayward, a mad innocence of adolescence... One time the cops didn’t come running was when another best friend and I decided to jump hostel. We didn’t have an overnight pass and we didn’t want to wait for the warden to fall asleep so that we could sneak out through the front gate, so we sat despairing, until we suddenly noticed that there was scaffolding outside the balconies. The workers had been re-painting the building so we thought why not? We had a couple of good friends on the first floor so we brought our bedsheets (never tell your children fairytales) and twisted it into a rope and tied it to a belt around our jeans and we edged along the scaffolding along the last horizontal row and we jumped from a ledge onto the top of a window and then – here is the reason why I think we have guardian angels – my friend and I realised there was a freefall of about ten feet below us with nothing to hang on to and there was a split-second when I could taste my fear in the silence and we jumped. She landed on her back and I on my bum and Time shuddered for a moment but we got up and waved and as we hotfooted it out the backyard we had to stop for a bit as we were gasping with laughter.  “We are never doing that again!”

It wasn’t just the fine wire we walked back then, it was that irreplaceable feeling of nothing can stop us and long discussions about the meaning of life and art and relationships and the world and how all the doors seemed opened for us wherever we turned. And that teetering sense of morality we had in our self-absorption, how in questioning everything we listened to nothing... until we started growing up and forgot our questions for a while....

I think it was our questions that made us real.

*

I don't long to be back then although it makes for a great laugh sometimes.

I like looking back because I like thinking I was reckless for once. But that wasn't it, because I was always aware of what I was doing. What holds true for me then and now is still the same: make your own rules and you will never look back and think "what if".