Amma Cheppindhi & Aakashamantha

There are 2 movies, I want to pour upon - Amma Cheppindhi and Aakashamantha...First Amma Cheppindhi - This is a story about a family, where there are mother father and 2 boy children...one of the boy is kind of childish in life, the other one is smart like rest of the kids. Father is sort of a scientist and mother is her usual role model mother types. Father detests this lagging child, who though in teens is the under developed. (However he sings songs and all that so I kind of think, he just wanted to have fun in life rather becoming serious!!)

Towards the climax, there is a bomb scare and apparently the flag post has bomb set in it and everybody is scared to take the flag along with the post and run far...actually they need a suicide de-bomber...and one thing leads to another and the 'role model' mother coxes this fun son to take the flag and run (not telling there is bomb in it) the son, knows knowingly runs with it and dies! because his mother has told, that is Amma Cheppindhi (Mother told)

That was a shocking experience for me...forget role model, she is not even the worst mother...but on a mother's day any year there are at least 2 channels playing this movie...as a tribute to motherhood! Please care to explain to me what am I missing or I short skilled like the hero of the movie!!
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And Aakashamantha...I think these days everybody is making this over loving father and daughter movies...and for some reason most of them find Prakash Rai as an ideal father (in real life he couldn't keep up with his wife...! that can only mean he is one hell-of-a actor another thing about his last name - he comes from a Rai family in Mangalore...but because people in his adopted land cannot comfortably pronounce Rai, he changed it to Raj! how shallow! He should have atleast thought about the other popular Rai, who even after marriage retains it as her middle name and even she works in his adopted land!!). Well now...here there is a father mother and a daughter...the journey begins from the birth of this baby girl. Mother is normal, but father Prakash Rai is obsessively loving his daughter...well I can relate this very well, I can be that! (That is the reason I have been waiting and ultimately saw this movie) Now being so obsessed is very romantic...so the movie provides that beautiful ride through their life and the daughter growing up into beautiful Trisha! The movie has some eye wetting moments like - On Prakash's birthday at midnight Trisha takes the father on a boat to the middle of lake with moon shining and says happy birthday with a cake...I would not mind dying for such a moment with my boy! and the other where baby Trisha gets a street side beggar home, because he has not eaten and fainted and not just asks father for feeding but forces them to accept him living with them...parents accept! such a golden heart!

Now the movie being such a sensitive emotional ride, I was expecting it to head towards a similar ending...but

It continues to proceed...as expected by Trisha falling in love with her MBA friend...(director choose to make this guy so special that even Prime Minister calls him!!) wants to marry and none of this things are discussed with the eternal friend - father...father is sulking in jealous and 'loss of love' status for some time, but all the glory of this groom like PM connection and he being good in nature will make him succumb and let the marriage and everything happen uneventful.

Well maybe most of the viewers didn't feel anything wrong with the happening...this is what happens in zillion homes each time a daughter gets married. But let me tell those zillion fathers, their relationship with their daughters was not as Prakash Rai's and Trisha's relationship was...this was mush more than what Kamal and Sridevi shared in Sadma (well! here I am not differentiating between love between a man and a women and father and daughter...let me write this some other time separately...but I dont believe there are multiple kinds of love if at all there is love it is only one type of love be it parent child or whatever else.); and if in Sadma, Kamal became mad when Sridevi went away, why/ how did Prakash Rai take it that lightly!! How can the director trivialize the agony of father which was anyway shown for sometime when he learns of his daughters love...by just making it look like any father's general daughter's marriage anxiety like - how will the new guy take care of her daughter and all that!!
This is a typical KLPD in the end...It looks like our director found a book in Balchandar's private library but the last few pages were torn and as he liked the story he decided to build the last 10 pages...

Clarity in thinking

Open letter to Ramgopal Varma...

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Ramu,

However much you give a damn about anybody else it would be interesting for you to give a 'practicing clarity of thought' lecture in a certain philosophy school.

Much in my younger days, I had told my friend - If at all one is talking truth, he need not care about memory, because if a same question is asked 10 years apart, he will give the same answer. It is all about ones clarity of thinking and being self truthful. While I possibly said that more theoretically, I have not seen anybody who is that as much closer as you are to attaining clarity of thought.

People flock at your blog or RGV has actually become a phenomenon...much of this is I think incorrectly attributed to the way you present/respond - you write or say the exact unexpected (or in a way only expected from RGV)...like that guy who asked you the question about the Akhri Rastha pirated cd's...in this common altruistic world, most of them would have -1. avoided that question, 2. intelligently answer + don't answer, 3. Lie; but RGV will not do any of this, he will not only accept that but will also accept that there were porn cd's...well you made his day...he got his fill or RGV for his life...... Well! what I am telling is while all this kind of response is pulling crowds, but the real stuff is the core of RGV (I kinda think of you as Frisco in the way you have fun with people at large, never get them know what is the core RGV)...that clarity of thinking which he has achieved and when I say you should lecture to somebody who are learning in school, there cannot be anybody better than you to walk the talk...but why do you care!

Movies - As your definition is most apt - a conversation...you device some of your interesting mental conversations as movies, a conversation can be interesting or not interesting or both based on persons with whom you are having it. A conversation cannot be a hit or a flop, but maybe here is the only difference, where the movies differ from the conventional conversation...but again for the person who is picturing his thoughts it should only bother if he was able to successfully communicate his thoughts or no, as long as he did, he can go and have his vodka. Anyway that reminds me of the Hari Katha lore in villages in India and one of the proponents of that art form - Chaganti Koteswara Rao...is a very successful story teller, in fact you don't even want a visual medium to get the picture in mind. audio is enough! that is the power of some of the effective communicators. So in that sense, only you have the right to give your self an award to either an Agyath or a Aag or Satya based on what you intended to say and what you achieved.

There were 2 movies released around the same year...Kabhi Alvida Nahin...and Nishabd, in that order and there is a dialogue in the former - Maut aur Mohabath...dono bin bulaye mehmaan hai and I felt what took Karan such a large canvas and more than 3 hrs to say was accomplished by you much successfully in Nishabh, kinda straight talk...again it can just me who understood it that way, others might have thought it in a different way and may be even you don't think so...that is possibly corollary benefit of this medium, each one sees what he wants to see.

Coming back to my initial point, I know you are a rare commodity, and even if you damn care about others, must speak at a academic philosophy forum...

regards

mANNAr

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Value of Money!

I thought of sharing a thought which I had...With what I am today, earning substantially more than I spend in day to day life and have simple needs...(I don't drive a BMW and still don't have a home of my own!), say if I come across somebody, who is very unfortunate and say has his son or daughter suffering with a grave disease and needs an operation and so needs lot of money.

I am not a person who sees a penny in a dime, so I think I can just lend a $1000 as well...and forget it as if it was not mine! People around me think this is highly irresponsible behaviour and have arguments with me...but my internal satisfaction is on that day that money valued more than $1000 to him and it had no value with me... I have made a better investment. Isn't it so??

Rare Talents

I am deeply sorrowed by the death of Michael Jackson...I am not so much of a music fan...did not hear so much of him or from the place and country I come...I didn't have the privilege of watching him dance, not so much...but the images in my mind (memories) about him had placed him in my heart.

During the last few years...its been a constant looking forward for me to see when he comes back from the mess he is into and starts doing what he is good at. Well it looked like he was just about to make a u-turn...when his shocking end has come!

Michael Jackson and may be few or many others who are extremely talented and a rare commodity and screwed up in life; were they not able to handle that success?...they just messed it up. It was like the whole talent was useless!!

One theory is for these rare commodity persons...he (she) himself is not rare...he is actually the most common person for his self, so he will not view it in any special way; and in fact he knows his weaknesses more closely and hence detests the celebrity status. But none the less he had one talent which world liked to preserve, which rest of them didnt have, so he should have cared more?

Let me elaborate my theory...talent and management of talent are kind of 2 separate entities. Say if some commoner becomes very successful in life because of his talents and he is talking to his car driver one day ..."boy, do you know something, it is just that God has been kind and I have been lucky also that I am sitting behind in this limo and you are driving...it could have aswell just been the opposite!!" Sincerely he is in his all humility sympathsing with the driver, but this is the nature and these are the people who fail in the celebrity or successful state. The rest of the crowd who are not so successful will get into your space and kick you out of there...Not that either of them intended to harm the other, but that is what will happen.
When you the achiever of the status didn't have the sacred feeling of that status or place or yourself...rest of the people whom you are letting them into will definitely not have and they will dirty the place as well as bring you down to comman man status.

So, by management of talented situation, I mean, if you don't have special respect for your self being achieved that status (which subtly means you differentiate with the rest of the people who did not make it to the top), you are bound to loose that status. You need not be hard on others who did not make it there, but you have to have that regard for your self...you need not be egoist, but you need recognize that you are good; you can give credit to God for what you have been, but you need also give credit to yourself!

May his soul rest in peace!

What the hell is this Drama?!

Doubting Thomas, which I am to the core...in this spurt of monologue (its not been a dialogue until now, so...) I decided to escalate my questions on life, death and the whole drama in between. I need to warn my readers (if any) that I will have dumb and still dumber questions, because most of the times I ask philosophical questions and don't make any effort to find answers which are already published. Or to put it in a very self supportive way - I believe - philosophical questions are to be answered by the same brain which has asked them ...any reading in that regard will influence the answer adversely! (great attempt to cover myself, hah!)

Questions - I have these with me for quite a long time, but recently certain event took place in my life and that has triggered my thoughts on this subject again...

I work in an IT organization, where my day to day job also involves interacting with multiple people and there is lot of coordination, etc...at times you have to review documents and other stuff and give feedback/ correction... The other day was one such normal situation, but due to being busy, I was delayed in performing the regular act of reading, correcting and commenting on a certain document...this thought was there in my mind while going home...decided I will take care of it, the first thing next morning.

Slept in the night, woke up in the morning and realized I had a dream around this subject...(I am not trying to sell that I take my work so seriously and get dreams of the same, no at least my boss will not believe that!) I could remember my dream very vividly - in the dream I was going over that document, reading it to certain detail and making mental notes of my views...nothing abnormal at all... this would have happened to all of us in school, college. In fact for me those were not dreams, they were nightmares and I would wake up in the middle of them and cry...hated books so much!. ... back to current that day...got ready and went to work and in my woken state went over the document. I was shocked...this document was not new to me at all...it was the same I could recollect from my dream! I started getting goose bumps, I couldn't understand what was happening

Part 2 - dated Oct 13, 2008

It took a little more time than I thought for me to come back to our what the hell discussion, the reasons are my thoughts are very scattered around this subject and it possibly would have been easy to deal a sub subject within, but let me continue with the same momentum -

So I was questioning and re-questioning about this life death and all that stuff since I remember like, why is this complex phenomenon of life existing? when even a small needle which comes out a factory has - a why question answered successfully, only after that a series of steps makes that product exist...and while that is true for all the things we can see in this world, except only for the things not done by a human being, we don't know who made and why he/ she made...

We learnt that well read research scientists have reverse engineered a little about life and are able to say life all began with some single celled life bodies and from there things gradually changed to its current shape, size and configuration...it is marvellous, it looks like journey of 286 computers to current whatever (I am not trying to make it less marvellous, I am truly amazed by the journey of life), but here we very well knew who made a 286, why he made and all that. Only that if in a similar way somebody had not visualised this life's journey, it is highly impossible to imagine - things randomly fell in such a highly logical situation.

I am very much part of this highly complex drama of life...very much, I did not get psyched and ended in a mental asylum of sorts...but truely if I was emotional about this question, I should have been, so, no, I am not being emotional about this question WHY, I am trying to logically understand more...

Even the incident I spoke in the first para's of this article, where I said, I was able to read through a document in my dream, I am fairly certain I will explain that logically, this will be simple compared to other bigger questions -

Earth, human beings, objects are all suspended in a highly charged space, Let me extrapolate from simple things like- how does a TV/ mobile/ radio work at my home; there is some source somewhere and there are configuring instruments which broadcast that content into air, charges in the air carry the information and at the receiving end there are some other configuration equipment at my home, which gathers all this from thin air and displays the images on TV, along with the voice, isn't it amazing?? and I must be mad complaining if the voice and images are broken sometimes!! If this is the communication capacity human beings have identified, and used it in their life's conveniences, life itself, which has conceived and built this infrastructure, is such a huge unknown domain, would have possibly much more capacity...so here is the analogy - the document which I read in my dream existed at multiple places, in the mind of the person who created it, in our physical infrastructures (i mean computers) and all that and human mind is a huge center of neurons, which are again basic elements of communication...so my mind could have connected to the document creators mind and read the document there or maybe (I am not sure) the computers??...I am truly amazed with my TV at home, so I am able to talk about this analogy easily.

So my explanation is - if Radio/ TV/ Telephone, etc are realities, there are much more amazing things possible in communication space through human mind itself...

to be continued further....

Where is the line and what is 'crossing the line'

I was pondering over one of the thoughts for quite sometime now and I would like to start that by asking - Why is having sex outside an existing marriage considered wrong or why only that??
PS: 'wrong' is a very wrong word, but for want of a better word let me continue to use it.

For more clarity let me explain - say a typical marriage, working husband Bunty, housewife Babli...

• they both are very much in love...in the beginning
• they are inseparable...in the beginning
• they eat together, drink together and have a lot of sex...in the beginning off course
• Babli likes Sharukh, they only watch Sharukhs movies...in the beginning
• Babli likes zee tv...they only watch zee tv
• fighting, arguments? no never...it is still in the beginning

While all this is happening TIME is a very cruel observer...he comes in between them...he catches both their hands and walks them through each others hidden rooms...
....when I say hidden room, this is the theory - I think all of us have 2 rooms within us; one front room, which is clean, and this is where we meet people in the beginning, and two is our dirty room, where we stack all our not so nice stuff and all that, which we generally don't want people to see, but few of our very close friends and family members would have walked into and lost the awe we posed to have (no they dont hate us, but the initial hype about the personality is lost). During childhood I would be wondering how great it would be if my father was an Amitabh Bachchan or a Gandhi??.. while whole world watch them on tv or news papers wouldn't it great to watch them day and night and also what not?? but you ask Abhishek, maybe he doesn't think so much more about his father than I think about mine...that's because, our common enemy - Time had helped him see his fathers hidden room.

...now back to our Bunti, Babli - Time was busy showing nooks and corners of back rooms... now, eek! Babli comes to know - Bunty doesn't brush his teeth before he has his morning coffee, he was doing this all his life, why is it so eek now??!...the differences start, arguments begin, fights happen and all that.. what the hell, let me brush the teeth...Bunty yields, Babli conquers...this is the beginning of "change Bunty movement" and mind you change is not easy...monkeys changed to human beings only in a zillion years and I am sure Babli's ancesstors were involved even it that!

with all this changes, etc...the friendliness is slowly lost between Bunti and Babli, he starts getting busy at work, Babli is more cranky, encounters are kept to minimum to manage tension.

At this stage, their inseparable lives started becoming separate...once upon a time when they used to always go together, eat together, watch tv and movies together, they start doing them separately...The other day Bunty was mentioning of a second tv and Babli shot him down!

Hmm! they still have sex ...but now a days rarely...not that drive has come down, but it is difficult to find time in between quarrels!

One of these days, Bunty meets his new colleague Maya...good looking, smart and all that, so Bunty quickly cleans his front room (where he introduced himself to Babli earlier) and they both kept meeting there...firstly work related...but slowly Maya gets interested in Buntys personality, our man - Bunty is smart and witty and Maya used to laugh at all his jokes (Babli had stopped doing that long back, she thought they were silly) they start going out, for lunch, dinner, movies...

and one fine day they crossed the line...they had sex!!!

Note: In the above Bunty and Maya story it could have been Babli and say neighborhood Rohit (Bunty was so busy at work, Rohit entertained Babli at home!) also...

now coming back to my original question - why is having sex outside an existing marriage considered wrong or why only that??

...why did I have to say crossed the line when they had sex, why not when they met, laughed, had fun and all that??
... Let me even change the premise a little bit. Let it not be Maya also, say Bunty's childhood friend Ramu relocates to Bunty's town and they start meeting regularly and have booze and have night long chatting sessions and ignored Babli all together... why is this not crossing the line??

If any of the partner has fun while the other is not part of that, should that be crossing the line?? or otherwise just for the sake of discussion - should fun be a free domain - Bunty, Babli, Maya, Ramu and Rohit can all have fun the way they want it ??

How to pursue personal passions?

Last few weeks I have witnessed some situations, which led to some of these questions-

What happens if you are passionate about doing or becoming something in life and that is exactly opposite to your partner or your parents thinking? It becomes easy if one direction is a good and other is bad...but life is not such black or white, sometimes, they both are good in their own way. How do we solve the problem?

Modern way of thinking suggests each and every individual has complete right on what he does and so the younger crowd may end up thinking I am talking nonsense, it actually very simple, his life, his passion gets preference. But is life so isolated, are different lives not connected and affect each other??

Say its a one child family, mother and fathers lives are revolving around that child (Indian reader can easily identify with this), child grows up and becomes an individual of his own. He decides, he wants to become a ascetic (a Sanyasi)...now even his parents regard other ascetics and they have themselves thought this child to respect and revere them, but now...they are disturbed, shocked, hurt and what not beyond any explanation.
The child, now a young man is choosing something they all revered, so that is not bad, but parents want to see their son, progress in material life, get married, have children and all that...and also pray and revere somebody else who is a Sanyasi, swami! I think they are following the common man philosophy, most of us lead that life, so even this is not bad.

Applying modern thinking, the young man should do what he wants to do, well, then the mother is very sad, she gives up eating regularly, falls ill, etc...seeing this the father is also unhappy. With all this their child is also unhappy. Becoming a Sanyasi he should be a source of happiness if not all the Mukthi and all that, which we are however not clear. I think Happiness is to some extent in the direction of Mukthi.

So because parents are unhappy, does he sacrifice his passion (or if passion seems odd with a Sanyasi; dispassion)? Even then the unhappiness flows the opposite direction...from the young man to the parents.

What is the solution for this dead lock?