Lal Ded - a review

The name, though she had many – Lal Ded, Lalla Arifa, Lalleshwari, of the 14th century sage-poetess, is one that stands out in the annals of Kashmir. Meeta Vashisht’s solo act traces Lal Ded’s evolution through her various incarnations, her birth and childhood marriage to her ultimate transgression into mysticism. Vashisht manages to convey an acute spiritual sensibility in the young Lalla, through her apparently innocent yet loaded questions. She skillfully adopts the personae of the poetess, her mother-in-law, father-in-law, husband, a cloth merchant and the narrator. The whims and caprice of the formidable mother-in-law especially are convincingly depicted. However, the use of the dupatta to change personae and to depict Lalla’s disrobing seemed rather hackneyed.
Vashisht uses many of Lalla’s famous vaakhs or eternal truths, suggesting her fusion of the apparently incongruous cults of Saivism and Sufism. This she does in Hindi, Kashmiri- plausibly for authenticity- and French- for non-plausibility?
And quite predictably, she breaks into a whirling dervish dance to depict Lalla’s discovery of the life of the spirit. Yet the force of Lalla’s transgression fails to come through. Her intervention into rigid structures, the radicalism of her sayings, vis-a-vis women and marginalised sections of the rift-ridden Kashmiri society, doesn’t strike the audience as powerfully as it ought to.
However, the script manages to incorporate the events of Lal Ded’s life fairly seamlessly into a compact whole, with one topical reference to ‘a time when Kashmir shall be in turmoil’. And another one alluding to the rudeness of flash photography

if i had a clue this would have a title

Offices are not conducive to good blogging. However i shall take the risk and say what i have to anyway. if i ever write a thesis, it'll be on the redundancy of theory. So i'll begin with that line with every assurance that i am not writing a thesis. Frankly you cant follow theory to make sense of the world. You have to live on your own terms, and draw your own conclusions. Thank you structuralists for pointing out that my words are not my own. But i hold on possessively to my thoughts as MINE. There is a me that is a sum total of experiences. And seeing this i rather invest in new experiences rather than be subsumed by them when i'm not careful. Got to get get out there. Live. And not carry a persecution complex.
So here i am thinking i'll moonlight as a theatre critic and make films and write and blah. And of course, nothing works out. And the self-recriminations start all over again. Cant do this. Dont know that. Am not like so and so. And i dont want to go down that road again. So its become something of a vicious circle. I was, and still am, an active member of the 'lets hope for the best and wait and watch" council. Anyway there hasnt been a real point to this post except for posting something new. and when you think about it, its dangerous to hope for something exciting to happen because, well, certain things happen and then you want to go back to the time when nothing was happening. Fresh can be sour. And i's as muddled as ever.

Hou Hsiao- Hsien, Cafe Lumiere

One of the few films i managed to catch at the cinefan this time.
What it begins, and ends, with, is Yoko's journey, her (many) journeys.
The trains are the pulse of the city. They run like clockwork, picking up commuters from one point, dropping them off at another. Round and round.
People on the train appear to traverse a closed circuit. But the tracks intersect. While commuters are transiting, they also meet other commuters, sometimes they get along. Life carries on.
Hajime-chan's self-portrait depicts a 'lonesome-eyed' baby in foetal posture, wearing a timepiece around its neck, surrounded by a circular nexus of overlapping trains. Yoko thinks Hajime wants to record train-sounds, station-sounds to capture the essence of trains. It seems more like an attempt to capture something deeper, like the sound of the mother's heartbeat that a baby hears unceasingly in the womb.
But babies have an uncertain future in this modern-day parable. In Yoko's dream, the baby is replaced by a wrinkled goblin. In Hajime's portrait, its surrounded by dark blood. While Yoko's dream appears to reflect the anxieties of motherhood ( somewhat like Mary Shelley's premonitions of her "monstrous progeny"), ultimately its significance seems to lie in its very incomprehensibility. Yoko's attempt to interpret the dream is parallel to a larger quest for meaning in her life, as in ours.
Then there's the theme of family.
Yoko is adopted, living away from her foster parents. She comes back to participate in the grave-cleansing ceremony with them.
There's the potential family in Yoko's Taiwanese boyfriend whose child she carries. But she doesnt intend to marry him, something her father is uncomfortable talking about .
Then there's Hajime-chan and Yoko's neighbour (the sake lady), who are like 'home away from home' for Y.
And finally the point from which we started, the family of the jazz pianist which Yoko tracks down. The pianist's wife shares her many happy memories of married life with Y.
The film didnt appeal to many i asked afterwards, who mostly found it slow. Which I thought was pretty unfortunate, since the pace of the movie was its beauty, true-to-life and very Ozu-like.

watching/singing

the image and the rhapsody
pretend to non-pretense
only as real as the translucent tomorrow
(that today yearns for though
furthest from tomorrow's despair)
but today and always
film remains my nemesis
and song my reason
though watching is forbidden
and the singing only gets tougher.

so i live

i write with moist words
bad poetry comes from the heart
so i whine, so i live.
i make a collage of thoughts
you cut them up again
so you dissemble me, so i live.
learning to grow, growing to sit,
flying low on high ground,
counting unforced errors,
so i live.

Weekend Television

sometimes the city looks at you
straight in the eyes
you dont want to look back at it
so looking up
you find specks of crystal
on your own million mm tele
its an all night show
so you wait for the cosmic drama
to unfold, yet
somehow it never does
then you say
thats enough
and you go to bed
and pray for a better show tomorrow night

And as I try to make my way to the ordinary world, I will learn to survive..

Who're we kidding..everybody's got secrets. In the old days, people would climb atop a mountain, carve a hole in a tree, whisper their secret into it and cover it up with mud. I never found my tree, so I told people.. and they didnt know what to make of it. Some just treated me like the ebola virus and fled.. others probed so much that i realised that I wasnt ready to spill everything and I decided I'd wait till I found my tree.

It struck me that finding a Mr. Right was going to be even harder with my 'other' life but then i guess its more important to appreciate yourself before you go looking for someone else to appreciate you. Took me some time to figure that one out. But I stick by it.

And now...

Written 2 years ago:

Nothing will ever be the same. Finding the other- in myself- has changed everything. Its not easy to write about- to wrench my heart out on paper- but the release must come through writing. What is literature now but a knowing retreat into self-delusion? Literature has no answers. I can't speak of the mysteries of this frightening, beautiful universe. Infact I can barely speak at all, without constantly telling myself that my thoughts are mine again. The future seems grey.. I'm clinging to a past that'll never come back. I feel like the old man on the moon. And debussy's Claire de Lune is playing in my head. In my head.

the wonder years

Written 3 years ago (almost to the date):

So why is it that i continue with literature?
Perhaps that question is best answered by tracing the journey from its origins. Undoubtedly the first stage of reading, that stage when meaning and motive had no demands on the consciousness, was positively thrilling and no, not unreal, but paradisical. And then to get initiated into the 'study' of literature, not only for the purpose of obtaining a degree, but also finding the 'inner light', the 'path' or whatever one chooses to call it, a study that seemed supremely satisfying at moments when one discovered heroes. Finding oneself then, with so much guidance and so many truths flying around invisibly, seemed like an entirely worthwhile and absorbing preoccupation. Not that it doesn't anymore- I'm still only 20. But i do occasionally have to justify the Masters to myself.
But today as I was thinking about it, as I do every other day, there was this feeling that came over me, not overwhelming in the least degree, but one which quietly shook my senses. This is what it was- I felt that I was reading not in order to seek reality but to reaffirm the reality and solidity, if you please, of my existence. It is like the painting of Turner's where the pale pink-yellow light of the morning sky gives shape to the shipping vessel on the horizon, a vessel which has no contours of its own.
Do i find my sense of being in words? Or is it that because of this cultivated habit of looking at words and real, lived life in a perpetual antithesis of reflection, I am falling into the trap of the literateurs, the novelists, the scriptwriters, songwriters et al? I verily believe its neither. It seems I, possibly like 'many others'(the community of the imagination which is conveniently called upon to review my thoughts and share good music with yours truly now and then)- yes, as I was saying, we seem to be walking on Derrida's moebius strip, anxious of falling off at any moment to land up free falling into the abyss of signifiers and equally anxious to latch on to the strip itself, hopelessly penning down cleches to save the 'reality' of innumerable experiences in the 'reality' of memory.
So really, seeing as I'm now conscious of being on the strip and can occasionally look down into the face of terror,its quite natural that I can't do without literature. Without the pressure of cramming for exams perhaps- no, definately. But not without lit.