A "different" movie? Wait a minute!

"A very "different" film". How many clowns have made this claim in the recent past with absolute trash unleashed on the audiences? So, after suffering through a few and not having been redeemed by even one, here is my retort to these uncreative dungheads trying to be "different".

If I am travelling in a new country, in a very explorative mood, and I come across a fruit I have never seen before, now that is something "different" I am willing to try. A new way of life? Sure I am willing to give that a try as something different. But the big difference, pun intended, is that the fruit has been years in the making, has paid its dues to the evolutionary process and I am the one who is new here to the experience. Same with hearing and trying to talk in a new language. The language has been there for a while and has been "effective" before I got there. Compare that to a crap artist trying to make a movie without a clue what the art is about, and you know how indifferent I have become to something "different" coming from these punks who should be lined up and shot without any mercy.

First of all, who the f*^k asked for anything "different"? A really good movie is about how effective and engaging the story is, how well the performances go with the narrative, and how cinematically unobtrusive the visual experience is. Greatness is built upon these basics, not with a mandate to be different. If I got ice cream for breakfast just to be different, I'd be mad as hell. There are certain things a breakfast has to deliver, and it better deliver, no matter what is served. I'd be delighted with my usual breakfast if it "involved" something different if interesting.

Aha! The magic word - "interesting". Only creative people can do the most interesting things. If you are an uncreative slob trying to be different, please, for sanity's sake, give it up. We can see through that lousy attempt of yours. That said, it doesn't take much to start something interesting. A little boy goes missing! You've got my interest. A married woman flirts with a man her husband doesn't know about. Interesting! But you give me gas about "human trafficking" or "global warming" and tell me you have a "different" film based on one of these incredibly "important" issues, and you've lost me totally. What the heck is your film going to do about any of these? Absolutely nothing. I can see you have no story and are trying to be a parasite on an issue that might get some people to pay attention. Trust me, if I am coming to see a movie, I don't want an issue. All I want is a freaking movie.

Now, if you must be "different", you need to become a master first. A master who can weave a story so convincing and so engrossing that I don't even know I am being led up a new path. I can't see what's coming because I have been set up so well. Conventions exist for a reason. Storytelling is a craft that uses conventions a great deal, just like pace bowling. Every batsman knows inswingers and outswingers and so do the bowlers, but they put in a hell of a lot of practice to get it right so that the suddenly unexpected fast inswinging yorker, which also everybody has heard about, can uproot the stump. If a bowler bowled one to the fourth slip, and then a loopy full toss that lands straight in the wicket keepers gloves just to be different, he would be laughing stock, which has its own value, no doubt, but I shouldn't have to buy a ticket to watch this tomfoolery, should I?

It isn't easy to make a film. It is even harder to make a good film. It is much harder to make a great film. There is nothing accidental about any great film. It takes creativity, knowledge, and paying your dues to the world of art. You really should not take cinema so lightly as to imagine that any clown behind the camera can be a cinematographer and every moron who can yell "Action" and "Cut" can be a director. It is a combination of various well developed knowledge streams that need to come together to create cohesive cinema. And yes, it does take time. If you don't have it, don't waste mine.

Please, just be cohesive in your work, and coherent when you talk about your film. We don't want unqualified "genius talk". We just want movies that work. Not intellectual tripe in interviews, clueless actors and actors in female bodies who hate to be called actresses talking through their heads about things that are not true about the movie in the name of promotion. Everybody promotes their film, and we're tired of that nonsense too.

You know what? You can be different from the crap out there. Try being sincere.

Hard work? What for?

"Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work."- Stephen King

An open ended quote like this from somebody as noted as Stephen King is bound to have a few people imagine they can work hard and achieve anything. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Hard work is overrated.

The most successful people in the world work very hard only in certain specific ways. In other words, they are very smart about where and how they apply themselves. Behind the choices they make is their inherent talent, judgement, intelligence, and sometimes, pure gut feel for what they are about to embark upon. Even more importantly, they are very good at realizing what is not going to work or what is not going to work very well. They know how to abandon and change directions.

The reason hard work gets so emphasized upon is because it is accessible to everyone. It comes with a baggage of all the good things like diligence, respect, duty, and all the other rubbish that doesn't count for anything if it led to failure or poverty, but it is safe advice, especially when it is getting dished out free of cost. I know many people who led extremely diligent, hard working lives, that never got a fraction of the success they craved.

It is easy to say, “You've got to work hard!”, but very hard to say, “You've got to become more talented!”. There is an assumption here that talent is God given but we mortals should only subject ourselves to hard work. There is another assumption that there isn't enough opportunity around, and hence, out of ten equally talented people, only one will succeed! Rubbish.

The universe is abundant.

With the human population explosion, the number of millionaires and billionaires in the world has been increasing, not decreasing. So, there is absolutely no truth to the scavenging notions that people try to put into our heads should we choose not to strain ourselves out with hard work.

Smart people have always been able to seize opportunities based on their aptitudes and knowledge, skill and experience, not by working at minimum wage towards their first million dollars. Investment in knowledge is much more valuable than investment of hours on tasks. You will never find talented people working on anything except fine tuning their very special skills. They might give the perception that they are hardly working, but that is when they might very well be taking in a lot on observation and learning.

A blind hard work approach limits exposure to new learning, new perspectives, and makes one less adept to handling change and shifting paradigms. The smart ones can see change coming, and the smartest ones are probably causing most of it!

You will rarely hear prodigiously talented people talking about how "hard" it has been for them. You will not hear them giving you any advice about hard work either. Kind of strange, you would think, that nobody has quite said, "Anybody can work hard, but only the truly talented ones will win!". Maybe kindness plays a part here.

Exposure to and curiosity about a variety of things make us better informed. Experimentation and freedom to explore further our trust in unknown things and expand our horizons. Not hard work.

The most beautiful things in the world are created by talented people, who do not fear failure, who do not give extra merit to anything just because it is difficult. They know very well that one cannot do anything special just by being hard on themselves.

So, if you are, stop harping about hard work, please. It's demeaning to a marvelously capable unit like the human being.

Oh, shut up, Leo!

A few days ago, came the damning headlines in THE HINDU - The USCIRF places India on Watch list. We also had a news item that India "regretted" this.

This would be the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, no less. It sounds like an organization that should send shivers down our spines if we flouted any religious freedoms. At the very least, it tickles mine.

>>>>"It is extremely disappointing that India, which has a multitude of religious communities, has done so little to protect and bring justice to its religious minorities under siege," said Leonard Leo, USCIRF chair. "USCIRF's India chapter was released this week to mark the one-year anniversary of the start of the anti-Christian violence in Orissa."<<<<

This definitely sounds as if religious minorities in India are scurrying for cover. "It's a siege!" no less. It sounds like we're refusing admission to Christian children in our schools, refusing to admit Muslim patients in our hospitals, and there's mayhem on the streets with women being raped and communities being pillaged. Sorry, none of that is happening, and we have an Italian catholic woman as the head of the most powerful political party in the country, a Sikh Prime Minister, and a woman President who just followed a Muslim president.

Meanwhile, Shah Rukh Khan, described as an "international icon" by US diplomats earlier today, was harassed and detained at the Newark airport just because his last name was Khan. It took the Indian Consulate to vouch for him, before he was let go so he could be part of the Indian Independence Day celebrations in the USA. I hope this makes SRK think twice before he declares himself the biggest movie star in the world the next time, but he has, as unwittingly as some of his movies have become successes, helped highlight something of importance.

For a diplomatically sophomoric, adolescent country like the USA to be giving advice to a country like India, particularly on the subject of religion and freedom is a bit like an opportunistic hyena telling a tigress how she should bring up her cubs.

The Chairman of the USCIRF is a conservative Christian, appointed by the wisdom of GW Bush. That in itself should suffice to dismiss him from any position of international import. Forgiving that flaw would be easy compared to the 600,000 Iraqis killed in the name of "freedom" by the US military.

The USCIRF describes itself thus - "USCIRF is an independent, bipartisan U.S. federal government commission. USCIRF Commissioners are appointed by the President and the leadership of both political parties in the Senate and the House of Representatives. USCIRF's principal responsibilities are to review the facts and circumstances of violations of religious freedom internationally and to make policy recommendations to the President, the Secretary of State and Congress."

Sounds like without such a lengthy declaration, we'd arrive at the truth – "the USCIRF is an organization headed by a conservative Christian appointed by a born again Christian, to collect data, filter out the reasons for but highlight violence against Christians, and present such information through diplomatic channels so as to cause embarrassment to other nations."

The Catholic Bishops Conference of India has put out this news of India being "watched" on their website like it is some kind of vindication of India's collective stance on their religion, while making no attempt to provide their perspective on the truth of the incidents that have invited this kind of attention.

The Chairman of the USCIRF, Leonard Leo, stands for abolishing abortion. In other words, he believes women should lose their freedom to abort their unwanted pregnancies. If given a chance, he would wreak havoc on India with his conservative Christian beliefs, leading to the abolition of scientific theories about evolution, and eventually conclude to every mind in India that Christianity is the only way. This is his first sneak attack on India, and he deserves being served notice.

India exists as a multicultural, multi ethnic, and multi religious society precisely because of its secular and essentially very Hindu inclusive tradition. This doesn't have anything to do with religion. And yet, Hindus are the reason India is secular. Without the enormously evolved presence of Hindus, Christians and Muslims would have killed each other to take over this abundant land.

India has not occupied another country, not caused war, death and destruction of other peoples, and does not interfere in the internal affairs of other nations, like the USA. It is a blatant insult to India to even be mentioned in some arbitrary fashion about religious freedom, especially when it comes from a conservative Christian think tank in the USA, who are all thriving on the history of destroying an entire culture of Native Americans.

The Spanish Inquisition has taken more lives than many wars have – in the name of religion. Where was the USCIRF then? All of a sudden, it is fashionable to use the Obama administration's diplomatic clout to make an attempt, however feeble, at providing some kind of protection to Christian movements in India with dubious credentials when it comes to secular activities.

The people of the USA themselves do not take kindly to proselytizing and by and large, believe in religion being a personal thing. Indians have that sort of outlook too. When Christian groups come to India and try to take advantage of the economically challenged to further a religious agenda of recruitment, it is bound to anger some people. By no means does Hinduism condone acts of violence in the name of religion, but Hindus, who have never been baptized into any religion, by the way, do not take kindly to the whole philosophy behind religious conversion through persuasion.

In this context, it is high time secular India told adolescent USA to keep its inept comments and opinions on religious freedom to itself. We'd run out of names for watch lists if we were to return the compliment to the USA.

WADA PODA!

All Indian cricketers are united on this one - against the regulations
of World Anti Doping Agency, or WADA, that require our cricketers do
just as any other athlete or sportsperson signed on to these norms,
state where they are going to be available every single day for an
hour, so that they can be tested for drug abuse.

Of course this is needless extra work that players have to put in to
make the lives of someone else, namely the WADA workers, easy. It is
irritating to say the least. More than an invasion of privacy, this
is simply not what Indian cricketers are used to or should be
subjected to.

Why not? Our cricketers are not against being tested, but they don't
want to tell some arbitrary third party where they are going to be for
a specific hour every single day! This is a questioning of our
lifestyle, and we hate it. We Indians die for one thing - freedom to
be lazy and random. We hate being organized to this level, and now
some foreign idiot is telling us to adhere to his norms? Of course we
are going to resist.

The players are also supposed to give residence details, competition
and training locations and regular activity locations. Apart from the
locations, the form also demands the precise address of the "one off"
location at which the player will be present for any significant
period of time on any particular day. Sounds like they're really
pushing it. Oh, yes, we definitely love the "precise address" part!

Abhinav Bindra has no problems against this, because he is that kind
of person, in that kind of sport. He knows discipline, order,
meticulousness, planning, rigour - that sort of thing. Our cricketers
know brilliance, bravado, pressure, having to represent a massive
population, being ambassadors in more ways than one, and so they are
pampered in the way we treat them. Simple - our cricketers are
emotionally closer to us than Abhinav Bindra. Who can blame anyone
for this?

Should they be above board? Most certainly not, but can we ignore how
they can afford to feel? Our cricketers almost single handedly have
been responsible for a feeling of self worth of the famous Indian "man
on the street". We were WINNING in cricket way before we won in
anything else! That is why we love our cricketers. It isn't easy to
grow a cricket market like India overnight. There isn't going to be
another IPL, no matter how much anybody tries to copy it. Fact of
life, it is lonely up there at the top and only India is there in the
cricketing pecking order. The Australians seem to have got around to
the fact and have embraced their few places in this success story.
Brett Lee and Matt Hayden seem to totally get it.

So, it wouldn't hurt to give others a lesson in Indian culture either.
We treat our heroes differently. They're not going to stoop, not in
the least to do something as trivial and stupid as "comply" with some
stupid regulation. Come on! Get real.

The first assumption that needs to be struck down is that Indian
cricketers are just like everybody else. They are not. The second
assumption that needs to be struck down is that since other Indian
sportspersons have no problem with it, it has to be easy for Indian
cricketers to follow. Nothing can be further from the truth. Our
cricketers represent the biggest, most colourful, most flamboyant
dreams of success to us Indians. Our cricketers are top flight and we
love them for their successes, individual or collective. So, they
have come to represent a lot more than a game to us. They represent
us.

The most important thing to recognize here is that we Indians have
reached a place in our own minds and hearts where we don't want white
guys telliing us what to do. This is strictly high class vs low
class. Our cricketers are kings, some even emperors. We don't want
some drug testing peon from WADA trying to dictate any terms to any of
our kings. It is that simple. Sure we are class conscious, but now
we have the financial clout of the BCCI to actually tell whitey to
piss off and we're enjoying doing it at every opportunity. We ARE the
high and mighty here. And we will bloody well lead our lives the way
we want to.

There isn't ANYTHING these perhaps well meaning but clueless white
institutions can do against the simple fact that we respect our
emperors and we expect lower fools to shut up and put up. This is a
matter of respect. Our cricketers have so far not behaved
disrespectfully, but fully expect to be respected for their POWER.
Pure unadulterated power is what we have over the cricketing world.
Who is to dare tell us to give in?

If a WADA representative called any of our cricketers or their
managers and asked for one hour the next day, there'd be no problem
anywhere. It would be respectful enough, and wouldn't hurt the
process one bit. But expecting our cricketers to go onto some website
and maintain a schedule like a bloody schoolboy - forget it, clowns!
What're you going to do? Prevent Indian cricketers from participating
in the Olympics? Does it look like Harbhajan could get Sreesanth to
cry over THIS?

This is a question of WADA officials putting thought into an obstacle
they did not foresee but cannot ignore - IF they want some compliance
from Indian cricketers that is. There is a lot more than a bloody
website here at play. My money is on BCCI's financial clout coming to
the fore again, and getting their way, and on the "white" block in
cricket harping forever that India abuses its power in world cricket!

WADA ngotha PODA!