Remembering Manjunath
S.Manjunath ( 23-2-1978 to 19-11-2005 )

Today is his 28th birthday.

On this occasion , a few words of a poet come to mind :


Do not stand at my grave and weep:

I am not there, I do not sleep

I am a thousand winds that blow;

I am the diamond glints on snow;


I am the sunlight on ripened grain;

I am the gentle autumn rain;

When you wake in the morning hush,

I am the swift uplifting rush of quiet birds in circled flight;

I am the soft stars that shine at night .

Do not stand at my grave and cry, I am not there. I DID NOT DIE.


Yes Manjunath you will forever live in our thoughts and hearts and inspire us to meaningful achievements.

Today , Let us remember this gutsy and committed young Indian who truly represents the committed and value driven Gen Next of India.

True homage to this inspired Indian would be to rededicate and redouble our committment to our great Country.

Please pass this on to a few more colleagues and friends so they too once again recall Manjunath and his great sacrifice.

Regards

Ali Sajid Husain
Indian Oil Corporation
Lucknow

Note Passsed on from an Alumnus of IIML. Mr. Sajid Hussain, the IOC nodal officer in Lucknow overseeing the case from their side. visit www.manjunathshanmugamtrust.org

Cartoon Courtesy: Sameer  ¶ 5:56 AM  3 stomped here! links to this post

Some Movie Reviews La Vita è bella (Life is Beautiful) 1997
Director:Roberto Benini | Italian | IMDB

wow. Roberto Benini! If you thought he would jump out of the television, you might not be crazy. He has such infectious enthusiasm. The movie is set with holocaust in the backdrop, and surrounded by misery of those times. As the story gets narrated you won't get infected by it. The life of a couple, their happy kid is what consumes all of your attention. Yet on the bicycle rides through the street with Benini and his kid, one cannot avoid looking at the shop windows with 'Jews not allowed' signs or the Nazi army marching in the city squares. Or the time when the horse of his uncle is painted in green with Jew-slander. It is difficult to do a drama with comedy when the back drop is so very grim. But then Roberto Benini intends it that way and pulls off a near magic. The basic element of the movie is what we all wish to believe and trust in (even in those grim times, especially in those grim times): Humanity. Yes, Humanity is what Benini chooses to frame for us.

Det Sjunde inseglet (The Seventh Seal) 1957
Director:Ingmar Bergman | Swedish | IMDB

The film, set during the days of the plague, brings a knight in confrontation with death (portrayed as a man dressed in black). The Knight challenges death to a chess duel, so he can bargain time to save a happy couple. To some the couple may symbolise the holy mother and God. The Knight wants to believe there is a god, there is a good that is worth living for. The times, the misery, the hopelessness, the deaths of people falling to the plague, makes such a hope an impossible imagination. Ingmar Bergman, one of the most talented directors of our times, portrays the helplessness, the anguish and misery directly. People are shown going around whipping each other, atoning for their sins, hoping for God's grace to follow. The movie is unrelenting and does not offer hope until the very end; even the end that is offered might not be a real consolation. The movie is a wonderful conversation, one that many of us have at one time or the other.

Le Corbeau (The Raven) 1941
Director:Henri-Georges Clouzot | French | IMDB

A really nice film about a doctor who is slandered by anonymous letters written by "The Raven" accusing him as an abortionist. Slowly the people of the township start to be troubled by the letters and its contents as the accusations start to engulf others. The doctor must act quickly, else "The Raven" would have done serious damage to his reputation. The movie depicts the slow coming apart of the society as slander spreads, and people start to doubt "what if there is any truth to the letters?, what if?". There is nothing superlative in terms of direction in this movie. What it does have is a plot and script which are tightly woven in the narrative. As many french movies that came later, the interest is maintained mainly through characters of differing backgrounds: a mother, a bureaucrat of modest reputation, a businessman, and the women in the town whose name gets embroiled in this controversy. In the end you get a very entertaining movie that keeps you guessing.

Labels: Movies

  ¶ 5:34 PM  2 stomped here! links to this post

Mar Adentro Mar Adentro (Portugese) 4.5/5
IMDB tt0369702

This is a really moving story of a quadriplegic in legal battle with the state of Spain for permission to Euthanise himself. Ramon Sampedro, the main character played by Javier Bardem, deserves our fullest appreciation for playing a role which allowed for little physical expression. The story gets carried through with great dignity and poignance, one that it fully deserves. The struggles in the life of a quadriplegic, the whole reason behind life and what it means to live, sets us thinking. It is hard to avoid these questions in the movie, as you are confronted by Ramon Sampedro throughout. All people around Ramon trying with all their hearts and love to assure him that it is still worth living, makes the movie more like a conversation. As the movie goes both ways on the issue, we are left alone to make up our mind. The movie is based on a true incident. So, we cannot pay as much attention to the ending as we must to the conversation that makes up the story.

It does make one wonder "Is life of a quadriplegic really a life worth living?" Especially when they feel like a vegetable. It also raises the question whether physically challenged have the same life as others, as we confront them in every walk of life. If so, why does the constitution(s) assert life as if it is equal. After all there appears to be irreconciliable differences, ones that can't be fixed purely by opportunities.

If there is movie you wish you had seen, this should make the cut.

Labels: Movies

  ¶ 7:55 AM  2 stomped here! links to this post

Hakka Dance, Culture I remember watching this guitarist video a long time back. So, I went back to it today and found this other video in his collection with a tag named Hakka. I, then, went off to find out what this Hakka was all about. Hakka is not the dance but a group of people that long time ago lived in North China, who over the ages moved south and many of them migrated to Taiwan (wiki link). The dance itself can be called Hakka dance, and the dance in the video is a war dance. What is interesting is that the following article and the video shows Newzealand Rugby team doing the war dance. Hakka has many dance forms other than the war dance. The following is a pictures from a Chinese Dragon dance celebration. Some of the Hakkas have also returned back to China since repression times, and the dragon dance celebration is mixture of both Chinese and Hakka dance forms.

Hakka seem to be an interesting group of people, though not a large group, who have played very important role in South-Asian politics, having their own unique cultural additions to folk music, architechture and literature.

The following website carries a nice introductory article about the place of Hakka women in the Taiwanese society. Hakka women have reputation, as the tough and dextrous among Hakkas, who are a patriarchical society in their makeup. The women not only were in charge of all the chores at home, but also worked by the men in the fields. They also boast of high literary achievements. Vivian Chang, writes


Caveat: I could not find any reference or direct link to the book by Vivian Chang mentioned in the article.  ¶ 4:26 PM  7 stomped here! links to this post

Rang de Basanti Rang de Basanti is a story that intertwines the story of revolutionaries of the Indian freedom movement to the impact it has on the youth that are at the receiving end of a corrupt governance. But whatever others say, to me it is a journey through pristine Rahman music, alongside some fantastic cinematography. The rest of the story comes unstuck.

The movie starts with an english journo, that comes to India, armed with her grandfather's diary to recapture the life of some of the revolutionaries. The grandfather's diary, more than admiring, is a sympathetic account of these revolutionaries, though the dude jailed and hanged them himself. Even though the journo is introduced as a very serious character, fast forward two scenes and she meets the lead role characters in a party doing the worst possible nautanki and decides these eye candies must play the role of these revolutionaries. That's the end of the journo and she turns into a eye candy herself. Her acting skills, if there be any, pale in comparison to any other in the cast. Kiran Kher does a wondeful job and Madhavan carries himself well in the supporting role.

Clearly Amir Khan doth not a student make. But get this! He is still one of the best actors in the movie. The movie relies on the working hypothesis that youthful indiscretion is a college behaviour and it is the only phase where people can be disillutioned. Why so? Can't working man of 40 be disillutioned and angry? they should watch fight club.

The flash backs to pre-independence story-track was done in an interesting way. The camera shots were undistracting in motion, the story rivets to the past era, but comes in a smooth transtition to the present each time. They show Atul Kulkarni and Kunal Kapoor in an escape scene from the british at the end of which they come to present meeting eye to eye and we see them grow closer as friends. The whole shot was neatly done.

The humour track is maintained right through the movie. Much annoying that it laces itself through even those rare moments of serious scripting that ties the movie to the apparent "message" of corruption in MiG-21 fighter plane deals.

The most wasteful piece of cinematic moment was when all end up protesting the death of the pilot Ajay (Madhavan). The "government" sends in some goonda police to clear the riot. The protest group was clearly much more than the collective 5 leads in the movie. The camera zooms in on the blows that fall on the 5, like they are holding the center stage. The whole moment of mob behaviour was lost. The camera should have stood back and absorbed the viewer into the scene.

The movie fails to integrate the hard issues into the movie as "Yuva" did. It does not hold the tight and focused narrative as "Dil Chahta hai" did. And both were equally entertaining. Pouring out more jokes does not make the movie any more entertaining. I think the director and script writer could have done better than this.

I didn't care much for the ending. The dialogues at the end of RdB were stereotypical. They could have just ended with them smiling and had a rolling script at the end as to what happened after. Nobody is going to care about it.

The movie's message is accidental. The primary seriousness and attention the script pays to issue of corruption is nothing more than mere homilies that were spouted in all movies through the 70's and 80's. So watch it for the music, cinematography and the beautiful shots, and Humour of course (it scores many points there) :)

PS: right before the movie starts, when they have "UTN presents" they have someone draw 3 lines of red blue and green with 3 of their fingers. The fingers were pretty darn long.  ¶ 12:11 AM  7 stomped here! links to this post