Some Thoughts

Q: Who am I?
A: No-one!
All right! I am alive! Does it matter?
For most of us – We don’t live life…life lives us.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

If you are able to spend your life in your own way – now, that is SUCCESS!!!!

ØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØ

Cinema gives you a glimpse of the past. You then realize the present and think of the future.

ØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØ

Americans seem to be obsessed by god and money.

ØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØ

Searching for the elusive.

ØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØ

A Place in the World "Un Lugar en el Mundo" by Adolfo Aristarain is a strong and powerful Argentinean movie about human lives and the place they dwell in. It shows that the rich always wins and that your dreams, ideas and visions however strong, need people to execute - and the people always ditches you.

ØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØ

De América soy hijo... y a ella me debo is a documentary by Santiago Álvarez covering the visit to Chile by Cuba’s Fidel Castro in 1971, just before Chile’s President Salvador Allende was overthrown and a Military junta was established in 1973. Good visuals.

ØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØ

Nobody will tell you not to do a thing. Nobody will tell you not to become someone, or somebody. Everybody will tell you to become a doctor, an engineer, an architect, a pilot, a business manager, a banker, a stock broker, an economist, a police officer, an income tax officer, a bureaucrat, a diplomat, a politician, a psychologist, an archeologist, a software engineer, a lawyer, a brand manager, a financial manager, a sales and marketing manager, a journalist, an actor, a director, a sportsman, a chef, a singer, a video jockey, a choreographer, a musician, a photographer, a mathematician, a physicist, a biologist, an accountant…the list goes on!

ØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØ

Most conversations start with pains and aches. The discussion goes on with what ailments one suffers medically along with what holds the Bengali community at bay. How the Marwari community, the Biharis and the Muslims along with the Central Govt., the rival political party and American Imperialism have conspired to make the Bengalis suffer!

ØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØ

While we are here on this earth, we like all past generations, keeps asking that same old question: Whether we human beings are free to decide and act or whether our decisions and actions are determined by external forces: heredity, environment, history, fate, Microsoft, Intel, Google, Twitter, Face Book, iPod, Smart Phones, Internet, Drones, Televisions...(and heaven knows what other miracles and magic are to invade us).

ØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØ

Stellan Skarsgård

Discovering Stellan Skarsgård in the 2011 film – “A Somewhat Gentleman” was a pleasant experience. Having seen him and not recognizing him in The Red October, Insomnia, Pirates of the Caribbean, Angels and Demons, Dogville and Melancholia now causes a great regret.

Skarsgård was brought up by humanist parents and had an atheist grandfather and a deeply religious grandmother. According to Skarsgård, this never led to any problems because of the family's mutual respect for each other's opinions. After the September 11 attacks, Skarsgård set out to read the Bible and the Quran, both of which he condemns as violent. Skarsgård is also a critic of religious independent schools in the Swedish educational system. Skarsgård has said he considers the notion of God absurd and that if a real God were actually so vain as to constantly demand worship, then he would not be worthy of it.

In 2009, Skarsgård, along with other non-religious artists, authors and entrepreneurs including Christer Sturmark, Björn Ulvaeus and Christer Fuglesang, wrote an article in Dagens Nyheter stressing the importance of secularity. The group also criticised the UN for its stance on blasphemy laws.

His views on religion as published in the Wikipedia was :

After 9/11, you read both the Bible and the Qur’an. What did you learn from that experience?

It’s frightening. Everybody says that all the ideas of goodness in the world come from the Bible. That’s absolutely bullshit. The Sermon on the Mount is a very nice piece about being good, but most of the Bible is a very revengeful, childish, brutal God. It’s fantastic stories, but there’s no rational reason to believe anything in it. I didn’t care about religion before 9/11, but I thought I should take a little look at it, because not only did the people who flew into the World Trade Centre claim they had God on their side, but then George W Bush stood up and said he had God on his side as well. So everybody who is religious has God on his side, which is terribly dangerous. And nobody should be sure they have God on their side.

Is there anything you have taken from it?

If you read the Bible, you realise that it’s actually good not to cut off the foreskin until it’s necessary. God came to kill Moses in the desert and Moses’s wife saved him by cutting off the foreskin of his child and rubbing it on Moses’s body and then God didn’t kill him. So always have a small child with a foreskin nearby so you can protect yourself against the wrath of God.

Shriveling Interest

The interest withers away.
With time and age, things pass by.
Believing or criticizing a philosophy fades away.
Religion becomes meaningless.
Films no longer enthrall.
People become repulsive.
The pleasure of listening to jazz and classical music dies away
The urge to say something goes away.
You said your piece - there is nothing much to say.

Barbet Schroeder’s “Our Lady of Assassins”

Barbet Schroeder’s Colombian movie “Our Lady of Assassins” (2000) gave a good experience of how the City of Medellin in Colombia goes about with its everyday life. There is a gay brothel, anarchic violence in every corner of the city, drug addicts and dealers, a reason to live and a reason to die, whores, poverty and where the institution of the church has completely failed.

It is not a movie for everyone – but a must-see for the few who bothered to turn the stone or took a different path. There was no room for any optimism in this movie. In times to come, this may well turn out to be a cult movie.

The Jazz Singer – 1927

The Jazz Singer, termed as the first talkie, as it progresses, drains you out. In and around the 45th minute, one of my favourites, the earliest form of ‘Blue Skies’ written by Irving Berlin in 1926, is doled out by Al Jolson.

Blue Skies have been performed by many artists, notably Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, Ben Webster, Errol Garner, Count Basie, Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, Art Tatum, Dizzy Gillespie, Oscar Peterson, Dinah Washington, Doris Day, Ella Fitzgerald, Jim Reeves, Willie Nelson, Eva Cassidy, and Rod Stewart,




Irving Berlin

E-keer Me-keer Charm Chi-keer

E-keer Me-keer Charm Chi-keer

Chamer Kata Mozumdar, Dey a-low Damodar,

Damo-daarer Haari-Kuri, Di-low bo-say chaal kuri,

Chaal Kortay holo bela, Bhaat khaye say dupur bela

Bhaatay porlow Maachi, Kodaal diye chaachi

Kodaal holo bhotha, khekh shayya-l-er maatha

Nature of Things

It is the nature of things -
That, rain falls,
Sun shines,
Dog sniffs,
Women gossips,
Man gawks,
And human species is corrupted to the core.
(There is nothing new here)
To be civilized is to lessen corruption,
(Since corruption cannot be totally eliminated)

Such is the nature of thing!

Eraserhead by David Lynch

Lonely, gloomy, filthy, desolate, repulsive, scary, depressed landscape and outlook marks the beginning shots of Eraserhead, leaving one to wonder what might emerge in the process of going forward in this movie. Clearly at the very onset, Kafka-ism pours out in the backdrop of ‘Metamorphosis’.

‘Liking’ this movie can get worrisome, since people might suggest a visit to the psychiatrist would be a welcome step.

Beware – you might be termed a nut for liking this ‘weird’ movie

Marlon Brando

Most of them know him from his movies like A Street Car Named Desire, The Wild One, On The Waterfront and the Godfather.

One gets to know Brando a little better after covering up his major filmography, which was completed today :

1950 - The Men

1951 - A Street Car Named Desire

1952 - Viva Zapata

1953 - Julius Caesar

1953 - The Wild One

1954 - Desiree

1954 - On The Waterfront

1955 - Guys and Dolls

1956 - The Teahouse Of the August Moon

1957 - Sayonara

1958 - The Young Lions

1960 - The Fugitive Kind

1961 - One Eyed Jacks

1962 - Mutiny On the Bounty

1963 - The Ugly American

1964 - Bedtime Story

1965 - Morituri

1966 - The Appaloosa

1966 - The Chase

1967 - A Countess From Hongkong

1967 - Reflections in A Golden Eye

1968 - Candy

1968 - The Night Of the Following Day

1969 - Burns

1971 - The Nightcomers

1972 - Last Tango In Paris

1972 - The Godfather

1976 - The Missouri Breaks

1976 - Apocalypse Now

It can by the way be noted that he started to behave like the Godfather role from 1967 (Reflections in a Golden Eye)

Remarkable sense of preparedness for his epic role - The Godfather!

Andrzej Wajda - The Promised Land

The Promised Land (Ziemia Obiecana) by Andrzej Wajda is an epic 1975 film portraying a Charles Dickens like atmosphere in Lodz, Poland, around the late 1890s, covering up the Industrial Revolution, inhuman factory conditions, ruthless capitalists, unprincipled, unethical, exploitative, deceitful, immoral & dehumanized characters, greed, treachery, extra-marital affairs, Poles-Germans-Jews nexus, tussle between the workers and the factory owners, et al.

Overall it gives a good demonstration of a Marxist view of Society

Questions

From the time of Aristotle to the time of the Marxist, we have always been told that human beings are social creatures and that the selfish, self-serving, isolated individual doesn’t stand a chance in any period of society, whether ancient or modern. But isn’t the essential precondition for survival has always been the individual first and then his relationships with his surrounding?


Is our existence based on maximizing our own pleasure and minimizing our pain – or have we build up a society where we overcome our own pleasure and increase our pain?


In the Social Contract written by Jean-Jacques Rousseau famously in 1762 he claims that man is born free and yet everywhere he is in chains…..did he mean social chains?


Can you believe both in religious teachings and well as what Charles Darwin wrote?
What do we believe in?


Any individualist effort is always perceived as anti social. But hasn’t it always been that one individual that drives the mass? Even if we polarize the world between what we love to term as the Capitalist and the Marxist-Socialist, it has always been that one individual that stands out – be it Bill Gates, William The Conquer, Alexander the Great, Hannibal, Genghis Khan, The Mughal Emperors, Rothschild family, John Rockefeller, Gaddafi, Hosni Mubarak, Warren Buffet, Sam Walton, Mussolini, Henry Ford and others on one hand and Spartacus, Oliver Cromwell, Napoleon Bonaparte, Garibaldi, Sri Aurobindo, Lenin, Trotsky, Marx, Gandhi, Zhou Enlai, Kim II Sung, Luther, Ho Chi Minh, Castro, Ambedkar, Sun Yat Sen, Pancho Villa, Mao Zedong, Che, Hitler, Eva Peron, and others on the Other. So where does the world stands?

Terror's Advocate by Barbet Schroeder

If you are interested in the other side of the legal system, if you are interested in anti-colonialist movements, it you are interested in the other side of the politics, if you are interested in the mindsets of people who adopt terror tactics and are called freedom fighters, then watching “Terror’s advocate” a doc by Barbet Schroeder might get you interest in a man they called Jacques Verges.

Jacques Verges' existence revolved around Algeria, Djamila Bouhired, Front de Libération Nationale(FLN), Cambodia, Pol Pot, The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine(PFLP), Yasser Arafat, Israel, Carlos the Jackal, Zaire, Mao, China and Viet Nam, Cheyenne Brando. Le serpernt , tariz asiz, Various African Dictators.

Of course one would need a lot of information and knowledge about that period at that part of the world to fully understand, appreciate, acknowledge and enjoy Barbet Schroeder’s work.

They Control You. They Own You

In olden days there was this view that whosoever owns the land has a right to govern it. Nowadays, whosoever governs the land, owns it.


ØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØ

Why is it that the average man follows faith and not reason? Is it because he is plain dumb stupid or is it that he is following some fabricated delusion? Why does he follow the myth maker in the same breath that he pursues his education on Physic, Chemistry and Mathematics or wants to reach the Mars?

ØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØ


There is this one group of people whose job is to get the ‘education’ and work for the Government and Private enterprises including mega-conglomerates.

They are the ones who supply themselves as manpower to the business world, to the banking and insurance world, to the technology world, to the military world, to the nuclear armed world, to the intelligence agencies world, to the so called scientific development world, to the intellectuals’ world, etc.

Then there is another larger group of more than 90% whose main job is to follow orders and not to think.

The idea is to get the mass away from things that matter. So there is the media world, very efficiently used by the controllers to involve the mass to get interested in astrology, sports, crime, advertised products, weather reports, celebrities, business, finance, stock markets, natural disasters, health reports and products, entertainments, foods, cooking, clothes, fashions, art, careers, job opportunities, crosswords, sudukos, horoscopes, cartoons, comic strips, advices, technologies, films, theatres.

They form your opinions. They control you. They own you.

ØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØ

Whose Law?

What does one man try to do with another man?
First that man takes away that other man’s way of life,
Then his customs, his culture, his habits, his religion,
And then his thoughts.
And?
Then he offers his own way of life,
His own customs, his own culture, his own habits,
His own religion and his own thoughts.
He tries to prove to the other man
how right he is,
How civilized he is,
how superior he is
and how intelligent and clever he is.
He provides different remuneration level for the other man.
He ridicules the other man’s wise men.
He brings in his own laws
And forces the other man to accept and respect the law.

Modern philosophy says that all men are equal before the law. The question is whose law?

Some men are more equal than others before the law

existentialist-to-the-nth-degree

Man is a cruel animal. One look around us and we’ll know why. We are cruel to nature, to animals and more so to our own species. We hate the minds, the guts, the pride, the freedom and above all, we hate in general. We hate those who think differently.


ØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØ


Found an unfamiliar word called “Stakhanovite” which means an extremely productive or hard-working worker, especially in the former USSR, who may earn special rewards; a workaholic.


ØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØ


Perhaps when depression arrives, it arrives like a Tsunami. A person who was termed as a creative genius and made other people laugh, died a depressed person. Robin Williams – you will be missed @ 63 !


ØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØ


Pimping and degrading ourselves for money by keeping the repressive system going. Is that existence?


ØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØ


Is existence all about endless commentary on human nature and human affairs?


ØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØ


Roma 2014 by Adolfo Aristarain is a work which is not for people interested in Cars, Crime and Guns. A lot of authors’ and musicians’ names are thrown in while the protagonist reminiscence his life while growing up and growing old in the 1960s and 1970s. Good, clean, enjoyable film.


ØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØ


So now it is no longer a question of mind over matter. Today it is the clothes vs. the mind. Prominent designers view clothes as the arrival of the man. One thought it was always a matter over mind. Now it is clothes - & hollowness!


ØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØØ

Freak or Fate

When you compare the tip of an arrow or the movement of an arrow to the sheer enormity of the size, force, and the movement of the earth, one might just be overwhelmed.

Call it fate or freak, a 17 year old archer practicing to represent Maharashtra at Dahisar, released his arrow to hit his target at 70 metre. A 15 year of boy at THAT time was scaling the wall, attempting to retrieve a cricket ball. The arrow managed to ‘divert’, hitting the boy through his ear.

Of all the places in the world, the boy had to be there at THAT time! Of all the arrows of the world, the trajectory of fate had to travel through THAT direction!

Reminds one of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s films.

Peter Watkins

Peter Watkins’ films are hard to find and they are not for everybody. Having gone through his works it is but inescapable to experience thoughts, ideas or feeling that never occurred or one has never envisaged.

Take for example - Punishment Park (1971) (http://pwatkins.mnsi.net/punishment.htm ) which forces one to think that ordinary people can have their lives changed or altered by the decision of people who are more powerful than them. We are but mere tools not in the hands of gods but in the hands of human authorities. This work is so close to reality that you might start getting bouts of anxiety and might even shake you out of your ignorant, complacent existence... Time to start re-thinking?

One cannot but imagine a work like Punishment Park and a work like Edvard Munch ( http://pwatkins.mnsi.net/munch.htm ) where PW masterfully negotiates through the 3 hours 30 minutes footage to bring us a part of the life of the famous Norwegian painter.

Moving ahead La Commune – Paris, 1871 (2000) gives a good account in 5 hours 45 minutes, that nothing much has changed since then (http://pwatkins.mnsi.net/commune.htm )

Culloden (http://pwatkins.mnsi.net/culloden.htm ) is a 1964 film which shows the 1746 massacre of the Scottish Clan in the Battle of Culloden. Brutal, violent, macabre, ruthless – but in short mind boggling! Yes, again the age old thought crops up – History is a story of bloodshed and bloodbath.

Can we every come to a consensus that war will be declared illegal?

Some things are inherent to mankind – cruelty, corruption, desire to possess and sexual urge. But perhaps nothing is more inherent than the desire to hurt, maim or kill each other. One wonders if there is such a thing like the civilized man since man seems to be every ready to tear each other apart.

For a grim and bleak look at the blissfully ignorant miserable human, for war mongers and for the mass in general – one must take a look at a powerfully isolated horror film ‘The War Game’ (1965). (http://pwatkins.mnsi.net/warGame.htm )
Till today, one wonders if anyone on earth can come closer to making a film like this.

Mass hysteria, Staged stage violence, keeping the youths happy and out of politics, emptiness, greed, manipulation, loneliness, advertisements, consumerism, control (over others by the Corporation and the Investors, which amazingly is true even today with examples of iPod, iPad, FB, Twitter, WhatsApp, SMSes, Google, Microsoft, Samsung, e-retailing, etc), mass duping, pimping, crosses replacing swastikas, Media opinions and influences, converting people, Nationalism, Religious fervor, ….reminds one of the Big Brother in 1984….all these and more – see ‘Privilege’ (1967) a cult classic prophetic film. ( http://pwatkins.mnsi.net/privilege.htm )

The Gladiators (1969) ( http://pwatkins.mnsi.net/gladiators.htm ) shows that all systems (capitalism, communism, Marxism, Leninism, Maoism, collectivism, socialism, fascism, Nazism, anarchism, egalitarianism, humanitarianism, humanism, liberalism, libertarianism, republicanism, counter-culture, etc.) exploit and are all the same and sometime or the other it is going to gobble you down. No one –ism is better than the other.

Strikes, Politics, Corporation, slow economy, rich oil producing nations, unemployment, preconceived opinion of the media, police fascism, authority and people in power protecting the media to effectively repress the less privileged, daily brainwashing session using the media, propaganda and false news being spread using the intelligence agencies of a country resulting in successfully scaring the mass, employees’ being repressed so that they can keep their jobs, terrorism of all kinds, nicely covered up packages of hope to the mass that freedom and self-realization can be attained while all the time it is expected that after a hard day’s work a man is expected to sit in front of his TV and relax, discourage political active participation, when the world is divided between the ‘know’ and the ‘don’t know’, when man produce gun to kill each other - it affects mankind at large. All these and more are basically covered up in Evening Land (Aftenlandet : http://pwatkins.mnsi.net/evening.htm ) a 1977 Danish drama film.