Your Moment Is Waiting

The highly impressive "Your Moment Is Waiting" ad for Kerala Tourism (watch the ad on keralatourism.org) raises several questions when it comes to documenting something, when an ad purports to recreate an authentic feeling or emotion: how justified is a filmmaker?

The ad in question is probably the only tourism ad worth its salt I've seen in all my existence till now for any part of the world: it pushes the boundaries of both film as art and film as spectacle, and it resonates with a traveller's emotions, his/her seeking of merging with an unknown. It also manages to give glimpses of Kerala to some extent, though trying to understand, comprehend, portray, and learn India can be an extremely difficult task. It is worth mentioning that instead of a local music score, director Prakash Varma has gone for a Senegalese composer's mystery-evoking piece, and of course the lead model, Miriam Llorah, blends in beautifully: she looks a discoverer at the same time as in harmony with her surroundings. In sum, it's one of those rare beautiful ads which come once in many years.

However, Kerala is not at all lonely: it is the unloneliest spot, even when you are in the thickest of forests and for miles there is no one, of India. There is something so bustling in the air itself, there is such a sense of life having explored every nook of this place, that, except probably to some extent for the Ananthapura lava plains, where man feels lonely in terms of free and floating in the sky rather than drifting, that feeling of lonely searching which the ad evokes is not there at all. Rather, Kerala represents a paradox of one feeling connected with oneself and yet being participatory in the world: one connects with oneself as part of the world, not as the individual detached from it, and yet the connection is the only thing that stresses and implies the individuality. From a director's work viewpoint, the film is stunning in that it is highly consistent, too: the exact shade of the sunlight while Miriam is floating on the Alapuzha backwaters is not only just so reminiscient and authentic, but also brings on again that feeling of searching; yet, Kerala makes you open the doors to the world and your heart registers every beat and every drop of water, and it is that openness that I miss in the ad. It's a wonderful ad, yet it is not Kerala: the international gloss added should not deprive something of its spirit. In India's and Kerala's case particularly, it is the happiness and the oneness with which an Indian lives, a resolution of everything. To come to India, and to Kerala, is to be liberated: and find all the missing connections.

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soon the birds fly away
and settle on branches, everywhere on the island
their raucous cries, their steady perches
and how they are slotted; to be a bird,
the definition is have wings and build nest.
and keep flapping those wings.

Grant Flower returns

Grant Flower's shock return to playing international cricket means even more than those times when Zimbabwe and South Africa were finding their feet in cricket in the late 1980s and early 1990s; I still remember an old Clive Rice struggling, another old John Traicos struggling even more. Thirty-nine-year-old Flower might or might not struggle, though I don't think he will with either bat or ball (and I believe he could be a handful with the ball in T20 cricket), but what he brings to the team is not leadership but the charisma of the halcyon days of Zimbabwe cricket - a team that had everything in the world, including their penchant of playing a game for the game, for the love of it, and not for making and grinding careers out, and yet a team that did not have a home.

What happened six or seven years ago is now painful history, but today a fresh breath is blowing in. T20 is bringing in never heard of money into the game of cricket, which would be good for the youngsters playing the game in the Caribbean and the African countries. There are options other than football, rugby and baseball. For a tall, strapping lad, basketball might not be the only avenue; he might still become a fast bowler. Because with the rise of T20, Test cricket will also rise, I believe: it is the 50-over one-day game that should suffer. I also see the United States entering the game in the next five years, of course only the T20s: that moment, especially whenever the US wins its first game, should be as pivotal a moment for cricket as was India's World Cup win in 1983. It will also be good as the power center will not remain one: earlier England, now India; rather US and India, two focal points of the game, with Australia an ambitious third.

The infusion of old and new blood in Zimbabwe cricket is not coincidental; a person like Andy Blignaut, why would he want to be a part of the team again (though not selected this time)? Coaches are pouring in for the Zimbabwean domestic teams from the world over, including someone of the stature and of the honesty of Allan Donald; they are even getting sponsors. What is important now is that the coaches play their roles: it is only encouragement that one needs in sport, especially in cricket which is completely a game of mental strength, guts and strategy. Masakadza especially is someone who is supremely talented: Flower must groom him. From somewhere, Zimbabwe needs to find a couple of good fast bowlers; they already have decent spinners. The bowling attack was the problem with Zimbabwe even when it was at its strongest; that is the first thing it must target now. I also think Zimbabwe must blood in a new keeper now: Taibu, though big of heart, has been given enough chances, and he is still not mature enough for the game. If possible, somehow, get Sean Ervine back from Australia (or wherever he is now!) and, the wildest of dreams, Doug Marillier. The most wild of dreams would of course be that in a couple of years while Zimbabwe rebuilds itself slowly and steadily, Andy Flower finishes his assignment with England's coaching position and returns to his home: now the challenge will be the sweetest, the toughest, and when has Andy shied from life's hardships? He loves truth; he will return.

The Story & The Idea

You asked me, isn't a novel an idea carried through its whole span using fictional characters? Yes; I ask you in return, isn't the expression of a man in itself always the venting forth of their ideas that they have carried all throughout life, that somehow they want to understand through the written word? Doesn't, when one expresses, isn't it without object at first? Don't I sing to myself? And when I write, it is as if something that I was not able to concentrate upon, something I was missing, by those words that will queue up in my brain and get written on the paper; as if something external to me resides in me, and is actually not external, and yet with whom I often remain unacquainted. But should the expression seek an object - in which case I call it propaganda; when a singer's sole objective is to give a concert, I equate it to a propaganda, but when she can give a concert and yet each time lose herself in the beauty she is creating, yes she's singing - or should the expression burst forth because it had to, because there is no reason except survival, except shrieking in the deep woods? Shouldn't the expression be free, carefree? So, everything is an idea carried forth, each expression: but when tempered by the discipline so that that expression is intelligible, that the shriek becomes a voice, the freedom becomes liberty, the idea becomes more than that: a work of art.

I don't agree with a lot of what Rand says, so maybe I could be biased; so I will take an author I love: Dostoyevsky. His novels were always not quite "well-structured," as he had a lot to say, his primary objective was his ideas, carried through diverse characters; in fact, just as with many other authors (including Rand's), most of his characters are kind of repetitions, though in Dostyoevsky's case sometimes the gradations are steep: Stavrogin is a horrific form of (pre-Sonya) Raskolnikov, with Ivan Karamazov somewhere in the middle in that evolutionary period. If ideas were the only criteria, then "The Devils" would be the best Dostoyevskyan novel for me: and not just ideas, but characters like those of Stavrogin and Shatov are strongly etched on my mind for ever. The former is a brilliantly conceived precursor of all that was to come to the world in the twentieth centuty: the fragmented, anarchist man. Stavrogin can rape a girl and yet not feel any guilt about it; the reason is not a mere "he's cruel," maybe he's not that - it's that things have become meaningless to him; ideas, beliefs, the world, the people. Everything's "egal" to him: c'est egal. Things are meaningless, he's tired, and he tries to live with the games he could indulge in. He's intelligent, sharp, brilliant - and he's tired. Ivan is still one step behind: things are becoming meaningless to him, because is there an answer to his question why an eight-year-old girl is shut by her mother in the middle of a winter night in a latrine for bedwetting? The "middle", the "winter", even the "latrine", and even the "shut" are in fact just peripheral, sensational details: the question is the reaction to the bedwetting. And, yet, as he cannot understand Alyosha and his love - and yet Alyosha is also searching for meanings, he also has none, he also is tired, but probably the only difference is that he's not lost hope to find them, or that they even exist - as he cannot understand that, he's still a step behind.

But, "The Devils" is a mass of brilliant ideas, that Dostoyevsky has desperately tried to fashion into a novel, but has miserably failed. For me, it remains one of my favorite novels, but that does not mean I can recommend it as a novel to anyone else. Can everything be a collage? The characters, the plot - they also mean as much, and more; suspension of belief is fine, but the alternative world in which now we're existing - because a complete suspension is never possible; I think, I exist - should also be believable. I wonder if you've seen any of the artwork by Salvador Dali, or his films: they're brilliant, I am in awe of the genius of the man, and yet they horrify me as much as Stavrogin did. Of course, you can put it all down to my old mad belief in meanings, that they exist, and my continual striving for them; but, if even the music is mathematical, and every single leaf in nature, even after all the mutations, has a pattern to it behind, how can I deny those meanings? I wouldn't even go so far: I ask you, if the other can touch you, how can meanings not exist? Meanings are maybe gained and lost, but as regarding existence, they do exist for me.