Last weekend I watched Tom Ford's A Single Man. The movie is a masterpiece and even more fascinating when you consider the fact that it comes from a first-time Director who is already a big name in the world of fashion design and therefore presumably expends a lot of his creative energy in that profession.
Based on a Christopher Isherwood book, A Single Man to me was about how loneliness and fulfillment are two sides of that essential coin of existence: love.
Beyond the theme, what bowled me speechless was how A Single Man handles it's context. The central situation is a 20 year old live-in relationship between two men broken by the sudden death of one of them
in a road accident. The movie gazes at the gay context unflinchingly and still performs a miracle.
Let me expalin. I am, I must confess, essentially uncomfortable around gays and any gay context. I am, of course, as adept as the next 'liberal', in disguising this discomfort in my social stance. But in my private moments, and movie watching is a private act, I flinch away from gays and gay contexts. The miracle of A Single Man was that for those 90 odd minutes it freed me of my prejudice!
The art of Tom Ford and Colin Firth, the leading man, enabled and uplifted me to go beyond the cage of my "learned matrix" to participate in the essential and single consciousness that runs through all of us. That
is the function of high art. To free us for some exhilarating moments from learning and prejudices into the wide open spaces of pure consciousness.
In fact to many a practioner of art there is no meaning to life other han the pursuit of these moments of freedom. Like my friend Salim Ghouse, the theatre personality and movie actor, says in reaction to some of my frequent and contorted searching for meaning in science, philosophy and spirituality, "the rest
is a meaningless void'. An extreme view perhaps but then to produce art one must start with prejudice.
Friday, June 18, 2010
Saturday, June 12, 2010
“You have all the watches but we have all the time”
“You have all the watches but we have all the time”.
The quote is attributed to the Afghan Taliban with reference to the NATO forces “occupying” their country.
Ignore the essential cowardice of terrorism that harasses and murders innocents wantonly and concentrate on just the phrase. What comes shining through is the “audacity of hope”. The pluck that propelled Obama from the shadows of a broken family and a missing father to the pinnacle of power is the same pluck that drives every human endeavor against the twin irresistible forces of Fate and Nature
In the long run Fate and Nature will outlast all human endeavor and therefore in the literal it is Fate and Nature who have “all the time”. The audacity of hope and with it the essential and defining spirit of humanity lies in ignoring obvious and overwhelming advantage.
Out of these dynamics of the audacity of hope I believe could spring a ‘positioning” strategy that could propel worthy but losing causes like the fight against climate change from the margins to the mainstream. The then mayor of London in a conversation in 2008 put it in stark perspective for me. “ All this talk about saving the Earth from coming environmental disaster is bunkum. The Earth will continue fine, it will be us who will be extinct”. Frame the green fight as a fight for our rights and our life rather than a fight for Nature, in fact a fight against the implacable forces of Nature and it will have all of us intensely involved.
So is NATO human endeavor and the Taliban a force of Nature or is it the other way round? Like in all things political the argument can be made both ways.
The quote is attributed to the Afghan Taliban with reference to the NATO forces “occupying” their country.
Ignore the essential cowardice of terrorism that harasses and murders innocents wantonly and concentrate on just the phrase. What comes shining through is the “audacity of hope”. The pluck that propelled Obama from the shadows of a broken family and a missing father to the pinnacle of power is the same pluck that drives every human endeavor against the twin irresistible forces of Fate and Nature
In the long run Fate and Nature will outlast all human endeavor and therefore in the literal it is Fate and Nature who have “all the time”. The audacity of hope and with it the essential and defining spirit of humanity lies in ignoring obvious and overwhelming advantage.
Out of these dynamics of the audacity of hope I believe could spring a ‘positioning” strategy that could propel worthy but losing causes like the fight against climate change from the margins to the mainstream. The then mayor of London in a conversation in 2008 put it in stark perspective for me. “ All this talk about saving the Earth from coming environmental disaster is bunkum. The Earth will continue fine, it will be us who will be extinct”. Frame the green fight as a fight for our rights and our life rather than a fight for Nature, in fact a fight against the implacable forces of Nature and it will have all of us intensely involved.
So is NATO human endeavor and the Taliban a force of Nature or is it the other way round? Like in all things political the argument can be made both ways.
Tuesday, June 1, 2010
The Power of Design
Design defined as the set of organizing principles that result in purposive systems as distinct from random noise, is to my mind the mysterious creative force behind the universe.
Someday when someone cracks the theory of everything, it is possible that at it's ticking heart will be an entity that crystallizes the difference between 'undesign' and design. Simply put design is why anything forms out of the great nothingness of 'undesign'.
The truth of the assertion can come from surprising quarters. You would think that poltical dynasties are accidents of history but dig a little deep and one can hypothesize a startlingly simple design that makes the success of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty inevitable.
In a society caught in a complex net of caste and regional identities, the creation of a famiily that arising from a displaced community shorns itself of all regional and caste identities through two generations of extramural marriage is a masterstroke in the design of enduring dynasty,
At a deeper level add generic traits that promote an easy perception of grace and you have multi-layered design reinforcing resonance, dampening dissonance.
Issac Assimov in his seminal science fiction work - The Foundation Series - invented a science called Psychohistory. Using Psychohistory the founding fathers of an uber advanced civilization called the Foundation predicted moments of civilizational crisis thousands of years into the future and even left recordings of advice on how to tackle each crisis.!
Those guys cracked the design of their universe.
For ordinary folks like us even a peripheral awareness of the importance of design can, I believe, increase the frequency of those terribly satisfying aha moments of intuition.
Someday when someone cracks the theory of everything, it is possible that at it's ticking heart will be an entity that crystallizes the difference between 'undesign' and design. Simply put design is why anything forms out of the great nothingness of 'undesign'.
The truth of the assertion can come from surprising quarters. You would think that poltical dynasties are accidents of history but dig a little deep and one can hypothesize a startlingly simple design that makes the success of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty inevitable.
In a society caught in a complex net of caste and regional identities, the creation of a famiily that arising from a displaced community shorns itself of all regional and caste identities through two generations of extramural marriage is a masterstroke in the design of enduring dynasty,
At a deeper level add generic traits that promote an easy perception of grace and you have multi-layered design reinforcing resonance, dampening dissonance.
Issac Assimov in his seminal science fiction work - The Foundation Series - invented a science called Psychohistory. Using Psychohistory the founding fathers of an uber advanced civilization called the Foundation predicted moments of civilizational crisis thousands of years into the future and even left recordings of advice on how to tackle each crisis.!
Those guys cracked the design of their universe.
For ordinary folks like us even a peripheral awareness of the importance of design can, I believe, increase the frequency of those terribly satisfying aha moments of intuition.
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