felt like quoting wonly...

...yet again!

woh afsana jise anjaam tak, lana na ho munkin
use ik khoobsoorat mod dekar chhodna achcha.

the aakrosh...

i saw govind nihalani's aakrosh again 2 weeks back. and well, i was disturbed. disturbed by what the movie says, the social, the political and the human issues the movie deals with. the spectrum of personalities that populate the script...

lahanya's father (nana palshikar) who has lived an oppressed life and is unconsciously but completely reconciled to the state of society and the inevitability of the oppression of the weak.
nagi (smita patil) who in her naivete refuses to read between the lines. assumes gestures and actions of people are what they are and for who it doesn't seem to occur at all that there could be invisible motives and some of them could be bad.
lahanya (om puri) the angry, the frustrated, who can not but see the oppression, the injustice, the power people wield and the helplessness that his community feels but he doesn't want to succumb to himself. neither does he have the deviousness or strength to fight the injustice, nor can he reconcile to it. alcohol and silent frustrated rage seem to be the only recourse...and in the midst of all this negativity, you see the overwhelming love he has for nagi. the pure human.
lahanya's sister, bewildered by the goings on and not knowing where she stands or what she is expected or supposed to do, or if at all it is possible to 'do' anything. probably understands what lahanya is trying to say, possibly believes he is right, but too scared and confused to proffer an opinion. she doesn't speak a word through the movie.
bhaskar (naseer) the idealist lawyer, fighting his first case with practically nothing to help him defend lahanya. but you see him going through various phases of realization of the reality of oppression, injustice, inhumanity and not just callousness but utter disregard for the adivasis, the lesser human beings. and decides to fight it from within the system.
dadhiyal, presumably the intellectual naxal who sees the injustice, believes it can't be fought from within the system, and so works in his own way to deal it, or so he thinks...allowing for the possibility of bhaskar's idealism prevailing.

dushane vakil (amrish puri) the veteran, an adivasi who has made it in life. a succesful, prosecution lawyer who refuses to be caught in moral dilemmas. he is someone who has seen and even experienced injustice but is in a situation now when he can chose to take an elevated stance of an objective puveyor of law, who only sees the visible truth. who refuses to allow himself to be swayed by reality. the truth made available to him is good enough for him to continue with life.
doctor patil, who is a pawn to himself. in a position of power but not knowing it, allowing himself to play the role situations demand of him, his priority is to mask his mediocrity, in a position of comfort that allows him to demonstrate an ethical and important role in society.

and you have the villains...the SP, the MLA, the contractor who are at the top of all this. the deviants, the powerful, almost megalomaniac who possibly don't even see anything wrong in the way things are, for they are the purveyors of injustice. if they see, they won't function.

i couldn't help but remember how deeply affected i was by the movie the first time i saw it. how disturbed i felt, how angry, scared, frustrated. angry enough to swear i would not let myself be quiet in the face of injustice, scared not knowing what would give me the strength to fight it, frustrated by insulation of our existence and the invisibility of injustice.

that was long long ago...life moved on...unknown to myself i was ascending the ladder of insulation, unfortunately i was not seeing it. insulation creeps up slowly and engulfs you, until you became part of a milieu that is a cross between the dushane vakils and doctor patils...considering how complex this globalized world is, you don't even know if you are a victim or a perpetrator or otherwise...feel like i have drawn a full circle and just come back to where i was 17 years back.

i remember part of govind nihalani's 'Dev' made around 17 years after aakrosh. and he deals with the same thought. he is still reminding us in his own way, in his own language! such a frigging waste!

gulzar's

ik baar waqt se, lamha gira kahin
wahan dastan mili, lamha kahin nahi
dekha tho yahin hai, dhoonda tho nahi hai,
pal ye bhi jaane wala hai...
- Golmaal (Kishoreda)

ek hi khwab kain baar dekha hai maine,
tune saadi mein, uras lee hai, meri chaabiyan, gharki!
...
taash ke patton pe, ladti hai kabhi kabhi khel mein, mujhse.
aur kabhi ladti bhi hai, aise ke bas, khel rahi hai...mujhse!
- Kinara (Bhupinder, Hema Malini)

impossiblity of personalities...

have been having generous doses of introspection the past few weeks!

whenever we go through a challenging circumstance and we have to make choices, I presume it is natural for people to score deeper into themselves and try and find the core personality we are. emotional, weak, rational, strong, non-believer, gullible, spontaneous, self-righteous, conformist, rebellious...

and then we want to make a choice based on our conclusion as applied to the present situation. to do this we try to predict what would happen when we make either choice. then we decide if this will make us feel good or not. will it make the other stakeholders in the situation feel good or not. and then how much do we care for the effect on the other stakeholders and how much for our own...all driven by logic and an assumption about the predictability of our nature!

and how do we determine this predictable core personality of ours? we have no choice but to go back to our experiences and incidents from our past. they help us define our personality to us. we try to make a judgement about ourselves and hence determine what we should do.

am beginning to really wonder if this is correct. our instincts are over time layered and cemented by experiences, emotions, ideas, beliefs and we go through this continuous process of what we think is change. but i think this is not change, i think this might just be the insulation of our instincts and hence a blurring and over time possibly disappearance of our core image.

but even here, there is this assumption that there was a core unique personality that was ours in the first place. and then there is this debate on whether there is such a thing as an innate personality unique to each individual.

i have gone through numerous phases of a changing external personality. i have to talk to different close friends and each of them exposes a different aspect of my perceived personality. it has been heartening to see the consistency in most of these perceptions of different people (who don't even know each other, so their individual opinions would not have influenced each others'). this consistency strengthens the belief that there is a certain 'me' that they know and hence i do too!! but then there are inconsistencies too, and some real glaring ones. so do we choose to ignore those? most likely we do...we are sure we have a 'real, unshakeable, personality' of our own and it is quite scary to think otherwise, so we just rationalize these inconsistencies and move on...

i am beginning to believe that this self-image is defined only by our interactions with others, hence their reactions to us and over time this fortifies itself. over time this becomes habit and we keep behaving this way with new people and their reactions, if favourable, strengthen this behaviour...if it creates conflict we usually are repelled, and so we go into this zone of comfort and interact more with people who react favourably...

i think we are all agnostics! we just take stances based on earlier stances that made a relatively less delible mark on our lives and our behaviours...and of course if something is immensely favourable or drastically unfavourable at a given point in time, we are either tempted or we acquiesce...and we might take a stance contrary to our "defined" personality...but just that once...not to say that we change...next time something similar happens it is equally likely that we may take either stance...

so if there is a really challenging circumstance what do we do? succumb to habit of "personality"...or succumb to temptation of comfort or that of our egos...suffering through it and trying to identify our instinctive behaviour is too long a haul...and too bloody painful!

of sleep and consciousness...

"the sleeping man woke into the world, into the chirping of the birds, the morning sounds, the red line of the sun just about to rise, the blinding world of senses. He knew he was not doing the right thing.But man cannot be stopped. He woke again. And then again and again. Until it became a habit and then a necessity and then natural. Time went by. The wind of thought weathered the rock of truth. Sleep is now the unconscious state. The state blinded by senses is now called the conscious state. When you are out of touch with your real Self, beyond the limited perception of the senses, is it really consciousness? Will the world realise the real conscious state sleeping in the minds..."

Sreekanth quoted this on 5th Jan 2003 in his blog! just happened to do a random click in search of the Sreekanth I had met a few years back...