Ginger drafts...

Out of the seething quicksand that rapidly sucked every object along the concentric circles, there arose something, just the tip of it was visible. We all, Mr. R, Mr. S, Ms.T and myself watched in amazement as the object grew bigger and bigger, the form of it now conceivable. As it dug out the mud itself and poured out, the pipe like object swivelled with a screeching sound of metal that we felt beneath our feet. The ground was shaking under the intense struggle between the heavy thick black viscous fluid the pipe contained and the ground that resisted the separation. Fumes rose up high in the air, the caustic ashes burned our nostrils, the reddened exteriors of the viscous pipe solidified as it fell on the ground with the tail growing behind it. After about two hours, the pool gradually died and the pipe still attached to the ground broke after it condensed in the air outside, the umbilical cord was shredded with tearful pools of concentric circles. It was still not day time. Mr. S ...

It was a steep incline, I was driving towards it on my two wheeler. But the wall rose up before me as a wave would, and to drive over it, I had to let go of my vehicle and crawl up to the edge of the top. I made it with barely enough time, the fringes of a collapse pattern were forming beneath my heels as I stepped on it and ran across the wave’s head. My friends drove before me, two of them, I wondered for a brief moment, if we would make it at all. They were no where in the horizon, squinting my eyes at the ugly bearded hag in a meditative mode in the room on my left, I proceeded to search for the window sill in the house. Something I remembered form the previous time I visited the place, I shuddered to let the thought play on my mind though, for I had barely ever visited this haunting mansion before. Then I found, behind a yellow coated wall, through the red tiled hallway; I reached out to the window and crouched into it. Outside, the sound of sirens and the street’s routine calme...

“Do you know who we are fighting the war against?” enquires the tall German officer pacing back and forth with a steady gaze upon the pretty Jewish boy in Nazi uniform, and the boy replies Russia, France, England, all of which are returned with a slight nod by the tall German. Finally though, stately, the German officer with his arms crossed against the chest, with an askance glance self correcting to freeze upon the boy, observes “Jews”, and continues “it’s a holy war that we are fighting”. This to me, is the most memorable scene of the movie. A Jewish teenage boy is growing up in Hitler’s Germany. A rare sensibility, movie strikes upon the teenager, whose sister is jealous, for she would have liked it to be the son of the family. Alas, this teenage boy ain't so much a man, he hides in a beer barrel to stay away from the march of Nazis, but gets home late, too late to bid farewell to his dying sister. With these scenes, movie sets up a stage filled with fractured emotions where...

“Solaris” is one of the top ten, greatest, groundbreaking and purest form of movies one must definitely see. I often wonder how it must have been to live in the seventies when scientific paradigms were shuffled ceaselessly. It was a time when the scientific world was indomitably theorising to have found expressions of the unification theory, the one law that explains everything from the atoms to big bang. It is in the spirit of those days that one must visualise, against the backdrop of the culture that was caustically rooted in scientific ecstasy that one must watch Soalris. If 2001, a space odyssey was the celebration of science giving way to inquisition of the nature of troubled human inventions; solaris is an elevation of philosophy, nature of which can only be understood through the movie. Nothing that I can say about the movie would suffice, it has to experienced through the movie. Physical laws governing the universe had been largely understood, we were probing deeper into the n...

Movie opens with an innocuous nude beach scene with Meinhof and her family spending the day out. Meinhof, a lady of great temper is shown to exhibit kind heartedness in the opening scene followed by stately appeal of revolution in the party conducted in her backyard. Brief interludes of students staging a protest and the police lining up before them; it is still innocuous at this point in time. Meinhof is shy, but as she reads through to the passage where the reference to fooling German pride is extolled, she is flushed red in her face, the interludes gradually turn violent. In fact, before you realise, the protest, which was only a gathering with placards turns into a pandemonium with the police beating up the innocent and the ladies. This scene is the evidence of what the viewer is up for. If you are not exposed to foreign language movies, you will find it very refreshing, for the movie is anything but Hollywood. Too many Hollywood action movies preserve the action for a moment to le...

Who would have thought that travelling could be so benumbing and delightful? We rented two honda activas to get to Auroville. I was not prepared for what we were about to witness. On the way to Auroville, you will find the motorists turning friendlier as you get closer. Trees on either side of the road stood in steadfast harmony as if in a wedlock. Through the mystic shade- slightly daze, for the last night's Black Label was still not worn off- we drove into one of the by lanes that seemed deserted at first notice. If not for the powerful 2 stroke engine, we would have found it difficult to ascertain our minds of the silence. We were out in the open; we drove in and out of the broad shadows cast by 200 metres long tall trees, but were gasping to make a grasp on the nature's irony. We felt claustrophobic in the forest, the thick and dense forest, so dark, it blithe fully stayed calm. Not a whiff of air entered the thick forest. We pulled over, made futile attempts at apprehendin...

Cronenberg's M. Butterfly is a masterpiece of intrigue. It is as if you have been thrown into China and have to find your way back home. Who would have expected that Cronenberg would muddle the minds of his audience to such proportions. A french aristocrat is seduced by a Chinese singer who sings a version of madame Butterfly that elevates our protagonist to the plateau of love. Decidedly, he follows her to her abode and is stately denied permission, for she is too shy and her culture is buried deep beneath the floor of the current time. 'The french have extolled the virtues of progressive societies to the point of apotheosis, from where they glance at the floor beneath them' the Chinese singer observes. The French man falls for the Chinese woman, the man of heresy finds himself amazed at the shy and restrained love that the Chinese woman orchestrates. So blinded by the platonic love of madame butterfly, he unconsciously confesses the french and US army strategies to the Ch...