It starts with a crushing feeling

Edit: I put a stupid title as I couldn't find anything more truthful

Considering the enormous pressure of tasks, responsibilities ,and things in general that I get to deal with of late, I thought I should write about them.

The key events are : the Crushing feeling, the sinking feeling,... (more to be added whenever I realize it )

A crushing feeling of sorts is what exhibits itself at these points in life at first.
And that crushing tons of forces turns into a sinking feeling only when one's ground isn't hard enough to hold it up.

So, at the crushing stage, you know that you have mismanaged either schedules, promises or priorities to let that happen. But then, that is the point to re-align priorities, find spare willpower and exert all forces against the crushing forces. This action, when done well at this stage with focus, gives tremendous boost to productivity, and results too are generally good. The reason for talking about results too early is because it is an observation. An observation which has a confirmation bias that when shit happens and you manage to get out without falling into the pit, you generally would have done better than the average lot who avoid shit altogether.

So there it is;how to handle a crushing feeling. If not handled, what could happen, you ask?

Well, some of them lead to a sinking feeling if the crushing lasts for a while and you haven't really done anything to alleviate it. I would first be concerned why you didn't do anything. Are you incapacitated due to multiple crushing issues, or is the sheer intensity of some of them so high as to blow your defensive fuses, or did some of them trick you using a bias and made you fall quicker than usual?

There are specific solutions to each of these types, and more to be found for any new types that do come up. Anyway, we are only concerned with the ones you can't handle at this stage.

This brings us to the sinking feeling. Now if this is in spite of all your efforts at the early stage, then boy, you have something to deal with. If not, go back to those steps (I know, I didn't write any steps) and try all of them until you get over the sinking feeling. Well, for trying well you might even cut down the sinking feeling to a crushing one, which you already know how to deal with. Voila.

Now for the ones that haven't reduced significantly, or haven't at all. I would now apply all cognitive tricks rather than try to face it emotionally, as most of the emotional tricks would already have failed. Now cognitive tricks are neat little lies that you tell yourself( quite like those you tell yourself everyday anyway), to deal with nasty truths( or lies that are hard to disprove ). I won't be able to give a generic trick here until I figure out how to write about them in that fashion.

Tips? Be smart, think wacky. Question the improbable and impossible ones, without worrying about consequences of unraveling even the most closely held beliefs. After all, most of the pain comes from closely held beliefs on ideas, people, things, and sometimes yourselves. Just be careful on what you are unraveling. So how to be careful without worrying about what it leads to? Well, in my software mindset, I can ask you to keep a separate namespace, or virtual environment to do the experiments with the hazardous material. If it doesn't work, you should have rollback stacks which allow you to forget what you saw inside. What is said,seen and done inside your namespace, remains there. You commit it to main DB..ahem neurological system only after a period of trials,contemplation and building enough checkpoints and identifying potential symptoms of early disasters.

Now, some of you might think: "I get the problem, but what did you say did for it?" or "Damn, how do I do that mumbo-jumbo?". Some of you may not even catch what is being talked about all through out. If you are in the first group with questions, which I assume might be the case with most of you who have read it till this point, I can help. For the others, well, not time yet for you to grasp this. Skip.

How to build yourself a nice HAZMAT(exciting term) area or sandbox(meh) environment?
Well, you do that simply by allowing generally toxic ideas to be formulated in your mind without judgement, and extract useful, positive information/messages out from it. Now, if you haven't tried it before, or have a fragile and emotional mind, I would tread carefully with these suggestions. What works for me may not work for someone else. Same way, what works for a serial killer's mind doesn't work for me. So take my advice with that in mind. I am not asking you to think of murdering someone you dislike, or doing something nasty beyond your normal range of aggression (God save me, if my reader turns out to be a psychopath, and doesn't read beyond this step).
Now, in order do that activity without damaging your own conscience( though I do admit that I haven't been able to make 100% leak-proof HAZMAT area, often poisoning my mind for a short period at times with that activity ), you need tools and belief systems adaptations.

In terms of tools, I can throw some terms like meditation, deep visualization, keenly observing own responses, reactions of people around, and general changes in mood/tone of yourself and people you interact with. Also being able to visualize your mind as being outside yourself helps you see yourself objectively and then on questioning provide subjective inputs which help you in diagnosis. It helps if you are generally suspicious or curious about anything in the nature, people, yourself, and all mumbo jumbo without judgement on sensibilities and external validation. Just play cool.

Belief system adaptations would be a major one if you have beliefs which disallow such practices. Moral codes, fear of judgement, believing in external validations, stereotypes etc. obstruct your ability to lift heavy mental weights with different and opposing ideas. So I have observed that people who are shunned from certain sections of society due to whatever conditions of non-compliance often have a very high mental resiliency, and if applied correctly they usually have a huge mileage in life.
But, don't try to force it. It is the non-compliance part that is important, not the getting kicked out part. If you are willing to not force a compliance just to stay put, then it also means you believe in your own methods, without which there is no way for you to go ahead. These paths seldom have guides or gurus to lead you.

Of late, I have felt that the path of certain religious orders, mystical sects and a multitude of non-compliant groups that defy definitions are similar in that sense. The availability of a teacher/guide is a boon as well as a bane. If not chosen or acquainted with the right person with the right level of independence given to the individual, its all a waste. Most of the frauds happen because people choose for compliance even in the exotic wings of life which are meant for non-compliance.

What a comedy. hu ha ha

Maduraikku pogathedee..

After pacing around in the scorching heat of Madurai, I finally find myself in the temple complex of the Madurai Meenakshi Amman Kovil.

The first thing that catches my attention is the blissful ecosystem with the peepals and the neems hanging over the ever clean tiled street surrounding the  Amman Kovil. I would consider myself a criminal if I ever understated the bliss and calm around. The soothing hymns floating along keeps the air even more rhythmic.

For those with an appetite there are many options. But right now I am after the famous Jigardanda alone. Waiting for some space to be made after the heavy lunch I had at the wedding, not to forget the extra load of soft drinks and tea that I had.

The experience becomes even more blissful after couple of hours of roaming along the streets under the hot sun, carrying a sizeable bag. The heat is slowly getting on me, and sweat flows down my face but I was strolling slowly.

I had been to the Madurai Meenakshi Amman Kovil a couple of times before this, and I still had around three hours before my train back to Bangalore. Having lots of time helped me observe many things around me. The hawkers selling  a variety of colourful bangles and cosmetics passed by with their wares, and were followed by a father holding his son's hands and telling him stories while walking around the compound. I wondered how many times my father would have held my hands and took me to umpteen places telling me fake stories to prevent me from running away ;) That moment, I wished to be home, to stop roaming and sit besides him and listen to the stories that he has to tell now.

Snapping out of my emotional whirlpool after a moment, I decided to take a good look at the gopuram. I think it was the South one I visited first. After a few attempts at clicking photos, I felt like an idiot and decided to examine the art work with my eyes. Roving my eyes over the large structure made my neck pain and I decided to take in the sight at ease. So, very much unlike my usual practice to stand and walk for long hours, I decided to sit down and enjoy the marvel in front of me. Nothing else was in my mind when I was immersed in the beauty of the ancient construction. Each demon, each God, every mythical figure in it seemed to weave stories in my head as the facts about Madurai's history kept rolling into my head from some storage. I might even have had a full blown historical and artistic conversation within my head before I decided to snap out of it and tweeted the pic of the beautiful tower :)

the towering beauty

Seeing me sitting on the footsteps of a closed shop, staring at the sky, a couple of roadside palmists approached me and tried to make me take the bait by offering to predict my career, matrimonial ventures and even going as far as claiming that from my face it was clear something big was coming :) I managed to break out of their circle and walked to the next tower. On the way, I found a hand loom showroom where I decided to check out sarees for Amma and found even more beautiful ones than the ones I had bought from Pothy's a while ago. But after getting a firm scolding from Amma for overpurchasing I managed to filter only two good sarees from that shop and moved on.

I didn't find the other towers to be as imposing as the Southern one, but they were pretty good as well. I soon found myself approaching the shopping areas and bagged some Amla and also managed to down a tasty cup of Jigardanda

 before I decided that I had eaten too much and started walking in the direction of the railway station, hoping I will take a couple of hours to reach. But it so happened that the railway station was too close :(

Tired after all the walk and all the food, I dropped my bag and sat down beside the platform, tweeting and whatsapping a bit even as my phone battery threatened to die out soon. All of sudden it started raining and I had to pick up everything and move to the first platform, grumbling all the way. My eager eyes soon found a notice which read "AC waiting room. Rs.10/- per hour. Tickets available at Platform I". It was pasted outside the waiting room, and so I guessed it meant I had to take the tickets from the ticket counter and went in search of it. Phew, it was a near 10 minute tired walk to get there and after another 5 minutes in the queue, the person at the ticket counter informed me that the tickets were available at the waiting room itself. I smiled a weak smile, thanked him and trudged back.

What followed was an hour of a repacking, recharging and telling the stories to all my friends. I stayed some extra time in the AC room until the train finally arranged and I had an uneventful journey besides a fully loaded

The murukkus, paan packets, kaaracheeva packet and couple of sarees bulged my bag as I put myself to a tough sleep among the chug-chug of the railgaadi :)

sayanora

A short movie on history of the Israel/Palestine conflict

Usually I never write about videos and other social media content I find on facebook and leave it to the people who notice it to enjoy it.

But rarely, I come across class material that makes me want to shout to the world - "Bloody go and watch this".

Here is one such

This Land Is Mine from Nina Paley on Vimeo.

I have never in my life seen such a clear illustration that details the long history of a political and humanitarian conflict.

Centuries of bloodshed, by various tribesmen, men of religion and ethnicity, all kill each other for the same piece of land, singing the same piece of shit song about peace and prosperity for everyone.

ha, could things be any more clear?

flame wars everywhere

News is all around us, and many of us devour upon it. I am a mild consumer of news.
News itself might be ranging trivial or funny stuff for leisure reading for people with specific interests to really breaking and important ones which everyone reads.

I occasionally get to read many articles from various news channels on interesting topics. I read quite less, as in I click on news articles in FB timeline,twitter timeline or in some news websites, only if I really get attracted to the headlines.

First I read the article, think upon it, and see if I agree with the author and his/her viewpoints depending upon my expertise on the topic. Then the mind seeks to know what other people or friends think about it if I feel it is something others might be interested in. So, I head over to the comments section to see the public perception.

The responses are interesting topic to study for data statistics and understanding the mindset of the readers. Comparing the responses to the same news topic in multiple media gives a good idea of the coverage of the media and the nature of their readers.

But there are also lots of news of high importance, for which the amount of public response seems strangely insufficient. I often feel short of content after reading some articles and wish to know what the general public reading it thinks about it. But almost all articles of interest to me garners no interest from the public that 'freely shares opinions'.

But among the few that do, I have seen such little useful and sensible comments that I subconsciously don't scroll down to the comments section for good articles. Take a news that even remotely relates to politics, war, religion etc and you get to the other extreme. There are lots of points, data and perceptions to read, but what spoils the apple cart is the flame wars.

Flame wars are fun to read upto some point, if the opposing sides have enough valid ammunition. But I have observed that most of the comments in the Indian media are very immature or sounds like plain propaganda message. I can immediately imagine a furious fanatic typing away on his keyboard trying to block the points made by the other side. The shit hits the fan when the topic covers sensational topics for no reason.

For this reason, sometimes I stick to respectable news media like The Hindu or some other foreign media for news that is of interest to me. Also I trust the category specific news feeds more as they don't tend to deviate from topic..

Pope washes off centuries of narrow mindedness

The news of the new Pope washing the feet of women, that too one being Muslim, as part of the rituals has come as a surprising relief to me. I see this as a sign of more relaxation and inclusion from the other wise tight controlled and exclusion oriented policies of the Church.

It was always a pain to see the gap between the real preaching of Christ and what the Church in his name imposed on the believers all around the world.

Compared to Hinduism at least, Christianity was expected to be more humane and based on human conditions rather than rituals and rites. But then in its drive to conquer lands and people's support, they broke all these and went ahead to just bring people under the umbrella of Christianity. The ripple effect of such practices can be seen even to date with lots of mindless rules that excludes people of certain social strata from the Church's ability to improve standard of life.

There has been lots of efforts from many people and associates of the Church to rectify these. But not so much was forthcoming from the higher echelons of the Church. Now, with the new Pope starting off with simple robes and now breaking liturgical rules to reach out to more people,it seems promising and hopeful that more acts of forgiveness,charity and well being would be carried out by the supreme body of Christianity.

From the time I first laid my eyes and mind on the teachings of Christ and the way priests and nuns like Mother Theresa have laid out their entire lives for the well being of the downtrodden without caring much about the rites and rituals of the Church, I have great hope and respect for Christianity. Nurtured in the right way, its teaching could bring a lot of relief to the pain stricken world.

Amen. Wish you all a wonderful Easter season.

Amen: a not-so-short review

i was asleep at 7.30pm when I roommate took my confirmation to watch the movie Amen, the show being at 9.45pm. I was hungry and tired, so I forcibly woke myself up at 8.15pm and went to find some food, which turned out to be not such an easy task owing to Holi.

Anyway I returned in half an hour, and then we had to rush as the theatre was 17kms away, and it would take a good half an hour in car to reach there. After lots of rushing and missing stuff, we had to return half way through and go in bikes. Not knowing the route and riding one bike alone, I checked up the route with another guy and managed to reach in time for the title song, in spite of the 50kmph constant speed.

It was at this point that I got to clearly know the name of the movie.

The title song itself was really colourful and full of interesting characters. Not like the usual special effects titles we see nowadays. This was more like a musical drama, with lots of animated characters moving across the screen, depicting the theme and the backdrop of the story itself.

The story is set in an island village, occupied by Christian families and the entire story surrounds these families, the Church, and the music band of this village(Gee Varghese Band). I don't fancy narrating the story in detail as part of the review, because it is quite boring to do so, and gives too many spoilers to people who just want to know whether the movie is good enough to spend their time and money.

So there is this band, which was quite famous and brought lots of laurels to the village. Even the village was known by the name of the band during those days But now, the band was past its glory days owing to a boat accident which killed many of its stalwarts. The son of one such clarinet player is Solomon(Fahad Fasil), the hero of the story. But he hasn't been able to bring out the skills in him into public view yet.

Then there is Sosanna(Swati Reddy) who looks absolutely charming and docile in her role. But looks can be deceiving and she displays the other sides of her character, and that too in quite unexpected fashions that make the audience gasp at the sheer audacity and creativity involved in depicting such scenes. Obviously, she is in love with our hero. Her role and expressions are quite hilarious in many scenes.

Then we have the band falling apart against stiff competition, church politics and local opposition. Everything is wagered against one final competition and then the usual stuff follows.

Another major character is father Vincent Vattoli(Indrajith). His role was really impressive and more colourful than any others, and quite comparable to Sosanna's. He dances, he preaches, he fights, he cracks jokes, and does some wonderful things. He drives the story actively, while all other characters play supporting roles for sometime. Then each character gets to drive the story for sometime. I was impressed by this round-robin fashion. There is no scope for hero worship here.

As with such stories there is the usual angry family, supportive family and local people involved in this story. They all serve no special purpose other than anchoring the story line to a very common one. In spite of that, these characters have been given lots of screen time and punch dialogues, making them more richer than usual supporting roles. It is like how real life usually is. How many of you can say that in your daily life there have been only a handful of characters involved deeply? Especially so with family stories set in rural backgrounds, where everything and anything is shared by a large number of people. I really relished that the supporting roles weren't too cliche.

That's not it, there are still more and more characters coming in , each holding out on there own with individual styles, performances and punch dialogues. The main priest with his villainous expressions, the kappiyar with his cunningness, Davis and Mariamma(with chatta-mundu-shades) from the other band who owns the arch-rival band, the toddy "chethukaaran" who delivers quite a lot of punch dialogues, Clara(Solomon's sister), the French girl Michelle who comes to Kerala to learn music and finds love instead,and so on.. Even Makarant Deshpande of "Yuh Hi Chala" fame pitches in with a very good character and performance.  Its a rain of punch dialogues, funny camera works, intelligent BGM and interesting roles. There is even a song sung for Michelle in broken Malayalam. I consider that to be the zenith of storytelling which departs from the traditional style where everyone gets their song sung by the best background singer, irrespective of how odd it sounds. After all each character has a life, a story and a song in their hearts, sung in their own imperfect ways.

Now that's what I found interesting. There is no better way to entertain and excite people other than deceiving their ability to guess each scene. Maybe the beginning and the end would still fall under the category of the easily guessable ones. But with all these rich characters putting in all this content, you would never be bored, unless of course you are preoccupied with trying to look beyond these. There were some forced jokes,but I felt it was acceptable, given the nature of characters and dialogues already going on in the movie. It is usually when characters move out of their roles and try to produce jokes, that they feel very artificial.

Conclusion-

Positive
a) Awesome camera work. Though some might get mild headaches with the swaying and twisting shots. Quick movements and funny slow motions add a lot of punch into the scenes.
b) Good title song and climax music
c) Lots of awesome lighting effects
d) Characters are the highlight. Each one is fully developed and has their own effect on the story. Inclusion of  Swati Reddy,Makarant Deshpande and Natasha Sahgal(who is really a NatGeo writer..omg!!) helps to not limit the characters to just the usual cast.
e) Good selection of location and script
f) Hilarious punch dialogues
g) BGM was enchanting at times, fast paced and sometimes quite devotional and rhythmic

Negative
a) The attempt to make it a 'musical' comedy. It didn't work out well. The songs were mostly out of place, lengthy and not so inviting.
b) Some roles were not very well developed, and were meant for some jokes.That is actually not so bad either.
c) The devotional tones were over the edge at some points, though very limited.
d) The climax was questionable. There wasn't enough reason for such a twist!

Overall it is a very good "Divine Comedy", as the title claims. Watch it for some good humour, lots of wacky scenes and meaningful sarcasm against the authoritarian nature of religious bodies these days. I rate it 4.2/5.