Unclaimed Baggage
By Aditya Srikrishna (Time wasted capsule)
How much does your life weigh? Imagine for a second that you’re carrying a backpack. I want you to pack it with all the stuff that you have in your life…. You start with the little things. The shelves, the drawers, the knickknacks. Then you start adding larger stuff. Clothes, tabletop appliances, lamps, your TV…. The backpack should be getting pretty heavy now. You go bigger. Your couch, your car, your home… I want you to stuff it all into that backpack. Now I want you to fill it with people. Start with casual acquaintances, friends of friends, folks around the office … and then you move onto the people you trust with your most intimate secrets. Your brothers, your sisters, your children, your parents, and finally, your husband, your wife, your boyfriend, your girlfriend. You get them into that backpack, feel the weight of that bag. Make no mistake—your relationships are the heaviest components in your life. All those negotiations and arguments and secrets, the compromises. The slower we move the faster we die. Make no mistake—moving is living. Some animals were meant to carry each other to live symbiotically over a lifetime. Star-crossed lovers, monogamous swans. We are not swans. We are sharks.
Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) in Up in the Air
What could the full-time corporate downsizer, also a motivational speaker, possibly be talking about? Obviously not about finding a huge bag that can physically hold all the stuff he mentions. Not the minor fact that we are all sharks and definitely not swans. Ryan Bingham is talking about the baggage we carry. In the forms of people—minor, unimportant, major, important—wealth, dependencies, liabilities, compromises, successes, failures, regrets and so on. And how we don’t need to carry it. Or probably should not. Ryan Bingham lives his life that way. He wants you to live it that way because that makes it easy for you and everybody around you. He wants you to carry nothing but an empty box.
What do you get when you draw up a pros and cons list of travelling with the baggage? You put up with people, whether you like them or not. You put up with everything they dole out to you, whether you like it or not. You get to share your joys and sorrows with them. You feel your happiness grow many-fold when shared.
Or you could be someone who doesn’t like sharing even the not-so-intricate details of your life with other people. You are better off being left alone in that case. You may be a loner. You probably keep to your books, your music, your car, your pets, your computer and so on. And you really don’t find life worth living for other living things. Apart from your pets. That’s why the whole baggage theory cannot be blindly followed.
It’s an extremely individual perspective. The importance of people in life comes from an individual’s need for acceptance, love, care, and mutual respect for one another. And yet there are individuals who think they are better off without any form of emotional human interaction. Their relationships are not layered but are born out of a mechanical dependency on one another. And it is opened and closed as easily as opening and closing a bottle. One such seemingly innocuous relationship is explored by Alex (Vera Farmiga) and Ryan, but that is until Ryan realizes that he got too sucked into the relationship, ignoring the agreed albeit unspoken disclaimers.
In real life, Christopher McCandless tried something—though not entirely similar—that was not in the realm of what is generally considered to be civilized human interaction. He moved away from people, away from a life of trivial pursuits, and inched closer to nature. In the movie adaptation of his life, Into the Wild, Chris says he wants to face the blind death stone with only his hands and his head for help. We don’t know for sure what he learned and what he realized. But conventional wisdom has us believing that ultimately the reality must have dawned on him—he must have realized that happiness is real only when shared. The movie adaptation leans towards this interpretation. But we will never know the truth. And even if we did, it might make little sense to us, for we would never know the real McCandless.
Christopher McCandless died alone in the Alaskan wilderness. In Up in the Air, Ryan Bingham believes that everyone dies alone ultimately, and so there are no incentives to take away from things like love, relationships, and people. Sometimes you are defined by the company you keep. But what if you keep no company? Do you become a statistic? Someone who also lived. Someone who had no one to live or die for. The question is whether that someone can be replaced by something. It’s an automatic choice to go for flesh, blood ,and soul instead of something metaphysically intangible. Ryan Bingham lived for his frequent flier miles. Five million miles was his target and that was the only focus he had. Chris McCandless lived to embrace nature in its rawest form; that gave him his high. The question we need to ask: would you rather be defined by a desire that involves you and only you, or will you go for a greater collective good born out of relationships that, in this day and age, come with all that baggage. The Holy Grail would be something that combined the best of both worlds.
Ryan Bingham and Chris McCandless were not conventional men. They obviously were not for conventional wisdom. That is why both of them are perfect case study material. The secret to living without baggage is to find that one thing that gives you the feeling of home. Some people spend their whole lifetime trying to find it. Some people don’t experience any enlightenment even after finding it. For Chris, it was in the wilderness. For Ryan, it was all about being up in the air:
The stars will wheel forth from their daytime hiding places, and one of those lights, slightly brighter than the rest, will be my wingtip passing over.
Pearls Among Swine
“There has been tremendous growth in the Hindi film industry over the last decade. Not only are new subjects discovered but often repeated subjects find new treatment and come across fresh. “
With a bunch of adventurous production houses willing to experiment with new directors, the Indie culture is here to stay. Not all of them succeed and not all of them deserve the brickbat meted out to them. Some of them, indeed brilliant are misunderstood by the audience or seem Greek and Latin to them. Here we see five underrated movies from the year that is drawing to a close and why they should have got their due.
Delhi 6
An ensemble performance cruelly reduced to a nonstarter thanks to a shoddily done climax. Delhi-6, at first look, had a lot riding for it. After the success and cult status attained by Rang De Basanti, the expectations from Rakesh Omprakash Mehra grew to skyrocketing levels. And added to that the music of AR Rahman, that was his finest in a long time, knocking itself into the library of his best records like Roja, Thiruda Thiruda and Rangeela. A script written with almost perfect precision and some brilliant sequences that move the characters towards that unification of principles (not story or plot, mind you) that turned out to be both the best and the worst aspect of Delhi-6. With the pushing-down-your-throat message climax being its only gripe, Delhi-6 was wee bit less than the sum of its parts. What was needed here was little justice and appreciation for a breezy two hours or so, with some of the best and subtle performances of the year. And Delhi-6 deserved that much.
Best Scene: Most of the Ram Leela sequences that parallel Roshan’s visit to India.
Luck By Chance:
Thanks maybe to her illustrious brother, Zoya Akhtar generated a lot of buzz for Luck By Chance, a seminal look at the Indian film factory with its myriad of characters, cartoons and buffoons. From a single viewing, we can be pretty sure that when Zoya started shooting the movie, she had a perfectly bound script in hand. If that was not the case, we wouldn’t have watched one of the most endearing character
based movies without squirming in our seats, slowly losing patience. Beginning with the year’s best opening credits, almost every tiny detail, including the name of the movie within the movie is etched with care. Zoya does a huge favor by not resorting to Madhur Bhandarkar sensationalism and “realism”, but rather takes us through a journey where we observe every aspect of the movie making industry in a way that manages to break the fourth wall. It’s tough to gauge why this movie failed the way it did, but it surely ranks as one of the top five movies of year.
Best Scene: Zoya managed to rope in a number of actors for special appearances. One appearance that stands out is that of Shah Rukh Khan, mainly because of the importance of the lesson he imparts to Vikram, the new star in the making. Spoken with the charm that’s Shah Rukh’s own, it’s a scene that triggers Vikram’s
Gulaal:
If I had got an opportunity to watch a preview of Gulaal, I would have implored the makers to give it a wider release. For reasons best known to them, Gulaal did not even get a release in Chennai. Neither did it get a release at major theaters in New Jersey, USA. An ambitious effort from Anurag Kashyap following the success of Dev D, with lesser known faces but with some of the most powerful performances of the year, Gulaal truly deserved better. Taking up a topic seldom dealt with – student politics – Gulaal had some amazingly written scenes with a different story and a radically different treatment. With the quest for power as it’s main theme throughout, with able characters failing and seemingly powerless characters outwitting the former, Gulaal was as surprisingly good as it gets. With a great background score, references to John Lennon, The Gita, and some nice directorial touches, Gulaal is a film I, personally, loved more than Dev D.
Best Scene: As Ransa and Dileep amble back after getting a beating by Jadwal and his gang, you hear a very different version of Sarfaroshi Ki Tamanna performed by Prithvi Bana (sung by the actor who plays Prithvi Bana – Piyush Mishra – himself). The timing and the song befitting the situation was quite understated but marvelous.
Sankat City:
A few years ago, Kamal Haasan made one of his numerous comic capers, called Mumbai Express. As extremely misunderstood as it was, it was also one of Kamal Haasan’s best scripts. Sankat City, maybe not as great, falls into a similar league. It isn’t a comedy of errors or the traditional comic flick we are all so used to. The characters in Sankat City are funny without trying to be so. The sequences, most of them, are funny without trying to be so. As in the whole sequence of events are funny on screen but not inherently so for the characters that are part of them. And that’s one of the main reasons why Sankat City failed much the way Mumbai Express did. Most of the set pieces quite cleverly created, Sankat City had the stamp of The New Indie Movie from Mumbai.
Best Scene: In the beginning, a radio announcer gives out a warning about an expected earthquake. It’s not the main focus of the scene and is in fact, completely offhand at first. And towards the end of the movie, this event sets up a finale that though not entirely unexpected, comes as an ingenious touch when you see how it alters the fortune of the main characters.
Kaminey:
Though declared a semi-hit, Kaminey finds itself in this list because of the appreciation that it never got. Judging only by the quality of film making and plot device, Kaminey is the kind of movie that Guy Ritchie or maybe even the Coen Brothers, would have been proud of. Kaminey spoke of a number of factors in its favor – quirky characters, intelligent set-pieces, great original performances and some of the best lines uttered – the stuff that cult cinema are made of. Vishal Bharadwaj’s gorgeous soundtrack and dialogues lend itself to the kind of film seldom seen on the Indian screens – a film that instead of spoon feeding you leaves it for you to figure it out. And when you do, things do fall into place admirably well. That’s the kind of cinema you watch with your thinking
cap on.
Best Scene: That scene in Charlie’s makeshift cabin, with Bhope Bhau and his thugs; small talk over vada pav and the best Mexican standoff ever filmed in Hindi cinema
Aditya Shrikrishna
