Sacrifice

SACRIFICE. The word which inspires, evokes reverence, brings compassion, warms your heart, and sometimes wets your eyes. The feeling of being larger than life; of being useful; of doing greatness.

But does it really exist?

Every human being has a set of thoughts and believes. She acquires it over the meandering course of her life. She starts assigning weightages to different parameters which affect her decisions. Some params are old, some are new. The weightages change. Any decision, at that moment of time, is governed by the current set of parameters and their weightages. Much like a cold-blooded foreign exchange transaction.

There come moments when, apparently, we have options to choose between. Deciding moments which will define the universe we will experience. They shape the fate which shall be cursed or thanked. And then arises the notion of sacrifice.

A set of humans put in that situation would generally choose a common option. Its their parameters, which will be mostly be same and have similar weightages, making a choice which is "popular". Yet, there will come along a person who would choose the Road Less Travelled. Disregarding the popular parameters, she goes ahead and picks the abhorred option. The generations to come, the peers who are dumbstruck, the texts which are hungry for ideals; get the rendition of a sacrifice.

The Sacrificer knows, she knows. The truth. She had no options. There didn't exist the popular option for her. Its pseudo-existence was nullified by her personal parameters being weighted differently. Her believes and thoughts could never have made her choose the popular option.

The constraints under which she is operating is different from what a set of people usually experience when they faced that situation. Was she larger than life then? She reached at that juncture influenced by uncountable earlier decisions. The priorities had already been set. The choices had narrowed down. And she chose that.

Should this be called Sacrifice? An act done because she could not have done anything else. It maybe a difficult path ahead down her choice, but she is helpless. Her governing factors leave her no choice. Its a camouflaged helplessness; created by her own value systems and preferences.

Sacrifice is an act which all of us do daily, every moment. We choose what we really believe in. There is no other way. On the contrary, when we (if ever) choose something which we dont believe in, it should be called Sacrifice. We call it Cowardice, though.

Let that act not become larger than life. Let not people forget that they chose something because of their own constraints. And we can't judge whether the Sacrificer has a superior set of constraints and weightages. She is what she is. Her act is hers. A sacrifice is nothing but a choice; acknowledging one's own helplessness.

Movies from books..

One of my favourite pet peeves - a bad film translation of a book.

If the movie is admittedly 'loosely' based on a book, and the filmmaker takes the liberty of tweaking the actual story line, either by, say changing some broad events or simply adding some characters, and I'm mentally prepared to see just another movie without the expectations of seeing the film of the book, then the peeve factor doesn't arise. Like for example, the recent adaptation of Great Expectation where Ethan Hawke played Pip and Uma Thurman played Estella - it played the Victorian storyline but it was set in contemporary America. Or, Baz Luhrmann's outrageous but brilliant Romeo and Juliet, which had the original Shakespearean dialogue, but was again, set in modern times (and had Baz Luhrmann's eccentric and colourful style written all over it).

My peeve is more with filmmakers supposedly making or trying to make an original adaptation, but ending up murdering the book. Mira Nair made a fairly bold attempt at trying to recreate Vanity Fair, but made a mess of it. Not a big mess, but a mess nonetheless. Gosh, Becky from the movie was anything but like Becky from the book! Oh, and my favourite duckie - Sanjay Leela Bhansali's Devdas. This movie was a complete joke, and Bhansali had stabbed the original novel 46 times in the chest and back. I mean, compared to Devdas, Vanity Fair was excellent. I had given in to the hype surrounding Devdas and had taken a lot of trouble to ensure that I offered myself a great cinematic experience from a film that was made by a filmmaker who also made a very pleasing Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam. Didn't go to the theatre when I was offered a free ticket from somewhere, instead, took pains to read the fat novel first to double the pleasure. Then I finally shoved my way through a packed cinema in extreme heat, alone, after buying a ticket from a huge queue - and all i ended up getting was the worst filmic experience of my life, coupled with insect bites all over my feet (nah, not those multiplexes..I went to a normal desi cinema hall). While both Nair and Bhansali failed to capture the original essence of the respective books they filmed, Nair still did a commendable job in catching an overall feel of society of that time. The art direction was excellent, and visual experience great. I give her 9 out of 10 on that count. However, the least said about Devdas, the better. Was Bengali society like how Bhansali showed? Heck, no. The dude got confused a bit, and he North-Indianised Bengali society. The overal value of his production was no better than those dime a dozen bad attempts at opulent saas-bahu soap operas, set in mahals and all.

Besides catching up on Devdas-the-book before going to watch Devdas the movie, I'd repeated this drill many times on other books and films as well, and more often than not, got disappointed by the lack of condensation between the two.

I'd like to mention here, whilst I disdainfully deigned all these bad book translations to movie, much of it sprang from partial ignorance. My views of good and bad were a bit too simplistic, without much insight or appreciation of the nuances of filmmaking and scriptwriting. Besides, my views were one-tracked - if a movie messed with the original flavour of the book, the movie was bad as far as I was concerned. Period.

It was while reading up Shyam Benegal's views the other day in an editorial that I became more congnizant of the nuances and restrictions that filmmakers face while converting books, and actually began to think somewhat objectively about the matter. In a summation, he opines that books which are deep rooted in literalism are difficult to film, and putting audio visual perceptions into metaphors and symbolisms is tough. Film tools and fiction tools being different, its difficult to coalesce a sense of uniformity into the two. E.g, potboilers, and other fiction with a high content of descriptive events are easier to film. Hence we have so many John Grisham, Robert Ludlum and Charles Dickens movies, while a Marquez, Rushdie or Joyce book, which feature intellectual debate, internal struggles, metaphors, consciousness and ephiphanies would be extremly difficult to put on screen. I'd just disagree with him on one point - he finds Death of Venice a brilliant adaptation of the book, while I don't personally, and this I am saying using his own logic and insight.

One great movie adaptation over the top of my head from what I consider to be a difficult book to film is Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five. The loosely related choppy pieces of timeline are distracting in the movie, fragments halt at one point and picks up somewhere else - in another era, due to which the flow of association gets somewhat disturbed, but they all come together at the end, interwoven with the bombing of Dresden event as a central recurrent theme. The movie evokes the same thoughts and black humour the book does, and anyone who has read the book and chuckled, would surely love the movie too.

But all said and done, a bad movie is a bad movie - it would still peeve me. While Slaughterhouse Five was great, Vonnegut's other book that was filmed, Breakfast of Champions was a complete disaster. And I couldn't have been more bored than when I was watching Battlefield Earth, the sci-fi novel by the founder of Scientology (forgetting his name).

I'll conclude with a book translation that is flashing in my mind most strongly at the moment. To kill a Mocking Bird. Gregory Peck's performance as Atticus Finch continues to haunt me for putting flesh and bone to a very remarkable character. His character, other complex semi-protagonists, the main themes - hatred, innocence, innocence lost and compassion, each needed to come out through the childish perceptions of a little girl. Easier said than done from a cinematic angle, but done seamlessly here. The filmmakers presented the essence of the book through the eyes of the child more eloquently than the writer Harper lee had done himself with words and metaphors. Needless to mention since you must have guessed already, this is one of my favourite movies of all times! :)

ps: most of the above examples were those that
randomly came to my head at that particular point
of writing. Not necessarily my best and worst lists.

I'm recycling one of my favourite email forwards

Email forwards are inherently bad, a social menace - spammers make silly forwards and asks you to forward them, and as you keep forwarding, your email ids get embedded in them - and one day, when that chain mail falls in the hands of a spammer, he gets hold of all the email ids embedded in it. Then, he sells it to cheesy sellers who try to sell a plethora of cheesy products by spamming all these emails with the hope that 10-15 of the thousands spammed will buy them. I never forward the stuff I get, since I would only end up doing a disservice to myself and my email box if I did. I know gmail and all is 1 GB and things are not as bad as the old days of 2 MB hotmail where spams would mean you'd miss your important email, but still, I dont want to be spammed, so I dont forward forwards.

However, I'll make an exception with this forward. I'll forward it to everyone I know. I'll also post it here. When I read this, it absolutely made my day! :) Here goes..

Generation Gap

According to today's regulators and bureaucrats, those of us who were kids in the 60's, 70's and early 80's probably shouldn't have survived, because our baby cots were covered with brightly coloured lead-based paint, which was promptly chewed and licked. We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, or latches on doors or cabinets and it was fine to play with pans.

When we rode our bikes, we wore no helmets, just flip flops and fluorescent 'spokey dokeys' on our wheels. As children, we would ride in cars with no seat belts or airbags - riding in the passenger seat was a treat.

We drank water from the garden hose and not from a bottle and it tasted the same. We ate chips, bread and butter pudding and drank fizzy pop with sugar in it, but we were never overweight because we were always outside playing.
We shared one drink with four friends, from one bottle or can and no one actually died from this.

We would spend hours building go-carts out of scraps and then went top speed down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes. After running into stinging nettles a few times, we learned to solve the problem.

We would leave home in the morning and could play all day, as long as we were back before it got dark. No one was able to reach us and no one minded.

We did not have Play stations or X-Boxes, no video games at all. No 99 channels on TV, no videotape movies, no surround sound, no mobile phones, no personal computers, and no Internet chat rooms. We had friends and we went outside and found them.

Continue!

We played elastics and street rounders, and sometimes that ball really hurt. We fell out of trees, got cut and broke bones but there were no lawsuits. We had full on fistfights but no prosecution followed from other parents. We played knock-and-run and were actually afraid of the owners catching us.

We walked to friend's homes. We also, believe it or not, WALKED to school; we didn't rely on mummy or daddy to drive us to school, which was just round the corner.

We made up games with sticks and tennis balls. We rode bikes in packs of 7 and wore our coats by only the hood. The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke a law was unheard of. They actually sided with the law.
This generation has produced some of the best risk-takers and problem solvers and inventors, ever. The past 50 years have been an explosion of innovation and new ideas. We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned how to deal with it all.

And you're one of them. Congratulations!

Pass this on to others who have had the luck to grow as real kids, before lawyers and government regulated our lives, for our own good.

For those of you who aren't old enough thought you might like to read about us.

This my friends, is surprisingly frightening...and yet it might put a smile on your face:

The majority of students in universities today were born in 1983 ...they are called youth.

They have never heard of We are the World, We are the children, and the Uptown Girl they know is by Westlife not Billy Joel.

They have never heard of Rick Astley, Bananarama, Nena or Belinda Carlisle.

For them, there has always been only one Germany and one Vietnam.
AIDS has existed since they were born. CD's have existed since they were born. And Michael Jackson has always been white.

To them John Travolta has always been round in shape and they can't imagine how this fat guy could be a god of dance.

They believe that Charlie's Angels and Mission Impossible are Films from last year.

They can never imagine life before computers.

They'll never have pretended to be the A Team, RedHand Gang or the Famous Five.

They can't believe a black and white television ever existed and don't even know how to switch on a TV without a remote control.

And they will never understand how we could leave the house without a mobile phone.

Now let's check if we're getting old...

1. You understand what was written above and you smile.
2. You need to sleep more, usually until the afternoon, after a night out.
3. Your friends are getting married/already married.
4. You are always surprised to see small children playing comfortably with computers.
5. When you see teenagers with mobile phones, you shake your head.
6. You meet your friends from time to time, talking about the good old days, repeating again all the fun you have experienced together.
7. Having read this mail, you are thinking of forwarding it to some other friends because you think they will like it too...
Yes, you're getting older and still rocking away to the 80's music!

So the Matrix hero turned Harry Potter reviewer and made it to a Newspaper column.

Neo's Harry Potter Review post from this blog has made it to a newspaper, thanks to my paindoo journalist fraaind Mehmal.

<- yeah, this is pinched from BDs blog.