Complete

The beginning and end are both great unknowns. The story is actually without either and only creates an illusion of completeness.

Sacrifice

Over the last couple of days, I've been having a conversation with a friend and with myself. And I am reminded of a scene from Atlas Shrugged (we've been talking about this book too!) where Dagny is standing with John and Fransisco in Fransisco's house in the valley. I'll not get into every line of that scene here (sorry to those who haven't read the book enough times to know what I am talking about). However, subsequently Dagny introspects about the nature of sacrifice in the context of human relationships (I think the idea of sacrifice with respect to material needs has a different connotation and different implications. Also they are take the form of trade offs since they are more measurable). This is essentially what I've been thinking about for sometime now.

I better appreciate now the nature of the dilemma she was contemplating and John was ostensibly facing. I can see where the temptations come from and why they are so tempting. Why it is sometimes easier to contemplate making the more "acceptable" choice knowing that one will hurt oneself in some measure, greater or lesser. I also realise that it is not easy to decide which choice is the sacrifice; that human relationships are not linear balance scales nor are they a fixed quantity where the sum of all relationships must always be the same. I don't know what choice I will make or when I will make it but at least I know what questions to ask myself this time around. And that I've found some measure of the courage it will take me to make either choice.

Inversion

Yesterday...
The city was noisy, the crowds pressed together. I could smell the sweat on the person next to me, making me wish I had a more palatable way of getting around. I pushed my headphones in tighter, the music blocking out the sounds of the morning traffic. I walked fast, keen to reach my destination, not wanting to linger.

Today...
I breathe the morning air & look at the familiar faces around me. Someone brushes past in the crowd, hurting my shoulder, but I can only smile. The bright sun warms my toes and I wiggle them in pleasure and walk at leisure to my destination, the same as yesterday. The song in my ears gets over mid way. I switch my player off and put it in my bag. The horns blare aound me and the vehicles whiz past but they don't make me wince... not today. Today I can only smile at everything that I once frowned at.

Striking a Chord

The journey through film studies has so far been fascinating. 11 movies from across the world questioning our assumptions and the stereotypes we live by every single day. Last week was perhaps the most difficult and poignant as two movies struck a chord deep within and made me look around, look back and look within me; they heightened my senses and brought more depth into things I had always known.

"TWO WOMEN"

Patriarchy is such an integral part of the society we live in that even the most rebellious of us get co-opted into it. It operates insidiously, not always through beatings and physical abuse; the process so routine that most of us don't even realise that we are being co-opted into our own oppression. And this is not a story of a 'conservative' society where women must wear the veil. It is the story of every modern patriarchal society.

A wonderfully sensitive film set in Iran, Two Women explores patriarchal domination through the lense of a friendship and the journey of the two friends through life. It is the story of how society slowly breaks the confidence of a woman who believed in her ability to conquer the world. Iran is not India and yet the story is so close home that if I close my eyes and look back at the women I have known, I can find at least two who have gone through that same relentless lashing of the water against rocks, dissolving it slowly, eroding, transforming, reducing. The movie brought these women closer to me, I went back and looked at their lives anew, my respect for their fight greater. One of them was a teacher who taught me at a time when I was much to small to understand any of this. She committed suicide. Her image came back so sharply during the film that I could have been 6 years old again.

The second is technically my maid, but I have long since stopped thinking of her in those terms. For 14 years she has been with us and is today as much a part of our family as anyone else in the household. She's a thakur from Madhya Pradesh, daughter of a Congress trade union leader, brought up in Kolkata. Married and packed off to a little village in the interior of MP early in life, she had the gumption to run away with four tiny kids as she realised that she had become nothing but a maid during the day and a sexual object during the night for her truck driver (and for good measure alcoholic!) husband. Rebuffed by her family, a woman who did not know her letters, had no qualifications, and four tiny children to support, packed her bags and one fine day landed in Delhi - a huge sprawling city where she did not know anyone and had no roof over her head.

Her journey to support her children by doing domestic labour has not been an easy one. And the physical labour was the least of the obstacles. Accosted by men, shunned by society for long, acceptance was not easy in coming. Today she is the president of the Mahila Samiti of her slum.

I took a woman's rebellion against oppression for granted for isn't it the natural reaction to any form of oppression? But then I realise now that the oppression itself can become so a part of a person's nature that to take that first mental leap to recognise the need for rebellion itself is so tough and requires a will power far greater than I had imagined.

The story of a confident woman breaking was scary. What was even more scary was the fact that one is forced to become an observer to the transition within oneself as cherished independence turns to clinging dependence, confidence into constant doubt, preventing the protagonist from breaking the bonds that shackled her and held her hostage. It was scary for it could someday happen to me and those like me and I hope then that I can show the same courage as Devi, who was able to leave.

"FUNNY GAMES"

Tom and Jerry has for long been one of my favourite cartoons. Sunday afternoon lunch, I would sit with my entire family and watch as a cat and mouse played out the most rowdy and violent chases. The impact of violence... I'll never be able to watch a Tom and Jerry cartoon quite the same way again. The sheer impact of this movie was enough to freak me out and I can generally sit through some pretty graphic stuff but not when I am expected to fill in the violent sequences from my own imagination; not when the "villain" turns for my approval, smirks and carries on.

The less said here, the more. A movie truly worth watching - it puts a lot of violence in perspective be it war movies or cartoons. It jars you out of the stupor, out of the numbness that settles in when something uncomfortable happens. It forces you to be a part of the process, to feel the pain and the sadism, to see the connection between fiction and reality.