Silence, it’s never late!

I was interviewed by Jackalope

Roaming around here and there I found Quantum leap(Go and read it ) and saw this interview, and now I am giving an interview here, wont talk any more, read on!

Here’s how this works:

· Leave a comment at my blog saying, “Interview me.” Include your blog URL.· I will respond by asking you five questions. I get to pick the questions.· You will update your weblog with the answers to the questions.· You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the same post.· When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.

· Have fun!

1. What does the name of your blog “Pentropy” mean?

Let’s go according to what my dictionary says:-
Pen: (verb) :To write with or as with a pen; put down in writing: to pen an essay.
Entropy: (noun) :(on a macroscopic scale) a function of thermodynamic variables, that is a measure of the energy that is not available for work during a thermodynamic process. (in statistical mechanics) a measure of the randomness of the microscopic constituents of a thermodynamic system.

I believe it makes sense now. An effort to Pen down my entropy, as I find everything so random around me, no order, no patterns, just strange objects, weird faces and creek noises.

2. What country do you live in now?

I will soon complete my 24^th year in India. Coincidentally that’s my age as well.

3. Should evil acts be forgiven for the sake of healing?

A strict no for this, we are all responsible for our actions, I sound like a book, but that’s how we have to live, on one of the two extremes of control, either a jungle (a real place of I live my life you live yours) and if we all sit down and pen down the rules, better follow them and live on the extreme which makes you feel like a slave, a hand bound slave of this society!

4. Should illegal immigrants be given amnesty in the U.S.?

I don’t have a fixed opinion over the same from an American point of view, as I belong to a country where illegal immigration itself is a big issue and not much is being done regarding the same visually. In both these countries this immigration is for trade and crime, as they are irremovably interwoven and hence all subsequent trouble. So, I personally feel that illegal immigration should be treated as a priority in order maintenance of a country be it U.S. or India and there shouldn’t be amnesty given.

5. Which forms of alternative energy do you feel hold the most promise for the future?

This is an unexpectedly strange question to answer, checks on my basic school knowledge. But, I empathize with the whole energy scenario and I feel conservation is the best alternative energy option we are left with! And secondly, time to convert human mind’s enormous and destructive energy for the sake of saving the next generation, this can be done, but how, I have no idea!

The Namesake

A little observation of two movies The Namesake and Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham

- Both based in the USA and India in parallel space and time.

- Both talk about two generations of developing India and the gap.

- Both deal with culture divide (to some extent, for sure)

- Both have the issue of non-conventional marriages

- Both directed by renowned directors of their times.

- But, both of them can be precisely distinguished in two distinct genres of movies.

So I was finally impelled and tied to the theatre seat for once to see a movie, and hence killing the sloth god in me. But at the end of it, I was the one who came out stuffed with satisfaction. For once, during the movie when there wasn’t much discussion taking place on screen, I was wondering that what makes this movie so placidly entertaining and I realized that it’s the lack of major Bollywood ingredients – noise, gloss and overplay of emotions, drama and the great Indian circuses. So subtle in its own domain, the movie walks at a leisurely pace, giving a complete worth for the viewer’s time (finding worth for your money, depends on your yardsticks) and senses.

Tabu has always impressed me, in spite of her very few recent appearances on celluloid, she looks amazing in all the different moulds she does in the movie. She plays Ashima and lives her fully in span of two and a half hours. A young Bengali girl, a lot fresh bride in a cold city on the other side of the globe, an old lady managing complexities of her life and her children’s. Irfan Khan justifies why he’s been getting all these offers from outside his own country and so little from his own. Amazing performer he is, without much hullabaloo he carries the role of Ashok Ganguly, doing complete justice to the fiction character.

Gogol, the character around which the whole movie rotates is played by Kal Penn (yes, the guy you watched in Harold & Kumar and American desi), who turns 30 today, but still manages to play a younger role with the same exuberance (and ignorance) of a youth, as required.

A fan of ‘The Interpreter of maladies’ by Jhumpa Lahiri, I now regret that I missed reading the book before the movie. ‘Salaam Bombay’, ‘Monsoon Wedding’ and now ‘The Namesake’, Mira Nair as thorough as she is controversial, ah, perhaps more thorough than controversial. For any Mira Nair, Jhumpa Lahiri, Tabu, Irfan khan fan this movie becomes an obvious must.

A lot of buddies have disliked the movie, a lot criticized it, some liked it, a few loved it and would be in the last category of them, the lovers, make your choice later, but for Godsake! Go and see it now, its getting off the screens, rush!

Waking Life

Quotes from an animation movie I like, Waking Life.

My comments on them would be an obscenity, so just read the screenplay writer’s !!

Speed Levitch:
The ongoing WOW is happening right NOW.

Philosophy Professor:
The reason why I refuse to take existentialism as just another French fashion or historical curiosity is that I think it has something very important to offer us… I’m afraid were losing the real virtues of living life passionately in the sense of taking responsibility for who you are the ability to make something of yourself and feel good about life. Existentialism is often discussed as if it were a philosophy of despair, but I think the truth is just the opposite. Sartre, once interviewed, said he never felt once minute of despair in his life. One thing that comes out from reading these guys is not a sense of anguish about life so much as a real kind of exuberance, of feeling on top of it, its like your life is yours to create. Ive read the post modernists with some interest, even admiration, but when I read them I always have this awful nagging feeling that something absolutely essential is getting left out. The more you talk about a person as a social construction or as a confluence of forces or as being fragmented of marginalised, what you do is you open up a whole new world of excuses. And when sartre talks about responsibilty, he’s not talking about something abstract. He’s not taling about the kind of self or souls that theologians would talk about. Hes talking about you and me talking, making descisions, doing things, and taking the consequences. It might be true that there are six billion people in this world, and counting, but nevertheless -what you do makes a difference. It makes a difference, first of all, in material terms, to other people, and it sets an example. In short, I think the message here is that we shouuld never write ourselves off or see eachother as a victim of various forces. It’s always our descision who we are.

Pinball Playing Man:
There’s only one instant, and it’s right now. And it’s eternity.

Man on the Train:
I haven’t seen too many(dreamers) around lately. Things have been tough lately for dreamers. They say dreaming is dead, no one does it anymore. It’s not dead it’s just that it’s been forgotten, removed from our language. Nobody teaches it so nobody knows it exists. The dreamer is banished to obscurity. Well, I’m trying to change all that, and I hope you are too. By dreaming, every day. Dreaming with our hands and dreaming with our minds. Our planet is facing the greatest problems it’s ever faced, ever. So whatever you do, don’t be bored, this is absolutely the most exciting time we could have possibly hoped to be alive. And things are just starting

Man with the Long Hair:
They say that dreams are only real as long as they last. Couldn’t you say the same thing about life?

Alex Jones:
Resistance is not futile, we’re gonna win this thing, humankind is too good, we’re not a bunch of under-achievers! We’re gonna stand up, and we’re gonna be human beings. We’re going to get fired up about the real things, the things that matter! Creativity, and the dynamic human spirit that refuses to submit.

Guy Forsyth:
Did you ever have a job that you hated and worked real hard at? A long, hard day of work. Finally you get to go home, get in bed, close your eyes and immediately you wake up and realize… that the whole day at work had been a dream. It’s bad enough that you sell your waking life for minimum wage, but now they get your dreams for free.

Quiet Woman at Restaurant:

When it was over, all I could think about was how this entire notion of oneself, what we are, is just this logical structure, a place to momentarily house all the abstractions. It was a time to become conscious, to give form and coherence to the mystery, and I had been a part of that. It was a gift. Life was raging all around me and every moment was magical. I loved all the people, dealing with all the contradictory impulses - that’s what I loved the most, connecting with the people. Looking back, that’s all that really mattered.

Sources :IMDB IMPAwards

The song pours serenity in my soul through ear doors

On my long one hour journey to office this morning, I picked up Smriti’s ipod shuffle and kicked off my morning. It played abhi nahi aana by Sona, followed by Imagine – John Lennon, Coldplay’s let’s talk and Pankaj Udhas’s Ahista and I was happy like a kid with handful, pocketful and mouthful toffees.

 

So content, yet so uncertain I never know what I want and what makes me happy, but it’s been a mystery for me how these songs make me serene and fill me with tranquility every now and then. My lust for music has increased exponentially after I started work. And with constantly dying desires, the only hope rays come to me through dot m p threes and dot w m vees. But, unarguably music addiction is bliss, a real sense of equanimity.

 

Such a long life, so little to do. So much to hear and so little time, beautiful ironies making up life. For most of us, it’s just a stress buster, or just a little rhythmic hymn dragging on some radio, but people who live on it, know the importance, ah wrong word, the temptation of this alcohol. May be I belong to those who are overwhelmed by the beauty of this art and the ugliness of their mediocrity to feel so great about something which is perceived by most of the world as a leisure for times not good for anything else. But this desolation is accepted as far as we keep getting the sense massage from these beautiful songs.

 

Genres and moods, variety of humans and varied tastes of life conjure up everything. From the velvet underground to Lata, from the doors to Jagjit Singh, Coldplay, Fuzon, Radiohead and Norah Jones, the stretches in music are longer than any other latitudinal and longitudinal magnitudes. And this is my luxury, for every moment I get something to make me feel intense about the current situation. Sometimes it’s the words, otherwise the strings or the voice, and sometimes amazing totality of it all, but I agree that it has some voodoo involved in it. This is the most sufficing topping of them all!

 

God rectified its error of making human by making music. Thank you god, very much!

 

Either too simple or inconceivably complex!

Stuck up in the real dilemma, or just playing the same routine life day after day, week after week nothing changes, everything is so static and even if it transforming, the speed is so unacceptably slow that I don’t realize it. This morning a gtalk status message read ‘The road to success…  Is always under construction.’ it confuses me to a painfully thought provoking extent. What is it that we want, success, what is it? Who defines it! Who draws the line, the limits! And most importantly, who cares?

 

I believe that all of us find out time from our pushed by herds all around life to ask a few questions to ourselves and most of these questions begin with ‘why’.  Why do we do anything that we do? What difference would it make? What is real meaning of our paltry existence? Why is this whole circus being created and managed and more amusingly, how? What if, it was all not there at all? Who designs and manages it all? And all that we crave for all the time all the time the desires that our naïve mind keeps generating all the time, money, fame, success, sex, knowledge, power, strength and what not, what if we had them all? What difference would it make, to me and to the world and hence recursive questions occur, this is the vicious most circles of all, probably that’s life. Or may be my scientific reasoning is too immature, and hence the birth of all these questions, or perhaps my spiritual beliefs as too placid and simple to believe any theories and preconceived notions. Whatever it is, at times, such thoughts kill me.

 

But, a pragmatic (as an intelligent grown up social element would name it) approach to such not so useful thought process would be accepting ignorance and flowing with the times and the lives because unlimited pondering over the same thoughts time and time again won’t make things any simpler and may deviate any simpler solutions that may be there for these questions. So, we continue to slog ourselves in those itchy spheres of life where some force plays around with time and space and we become part of the great game called existence. There are no rules, there is no winner, its just an ongoing circus with a lot of performers and a lot more performers (I have refined the word joker!) and spend the on stage time the way we want to, craving for more desiring elements, unknowingly and sometimes unwontedly as well. Just like that!

 

Life is either too simple or inconceivably complex to comprehend, but almost all of us live it just in between. Neither enjoying the subtle ground realities of come-live-go nor digging the real truth of what the hell is this all about. Just somewhere in the middle, there is a long time left, may be we should think about making our way out of the interval line and taking up one of the more sensible fields.

 

Dying to defy the quest

 

Picture : Postsecret thanks again

Delicatessen

Delicatessen - A shop selling ready-to-eat food products. Thanks to the French movie festival at Nani Cinematheque. I got a chance to see this amazing movie. After already watching a good movie and a bad movie me, Chotu(hey, Saurabh Nandan!) and Divya were a little confused whether to go back for the third movie in a row and make it a complete French treat for an otherwise slothful dry Saturday. And thanks to that great Udupi restaurant at Miller road – Cunningham road junction and we had all the energy to go for the third movie of the day.

Totally dependent on subtitles for basic comprehension, we expected a nice light comedy to cheer us up. But! It started like a Ramsay brother classic. Dark ambience, a dull basement and a shuddery old butcher, oohh what a recipe for a comedy! But it looked amusing to all of us. Based in a post destruction times, it is so much like a depiction of a man eat man society but presented beautifully and comically to the comfort of viewers’ sentimental vibes.

The butcher, who is also the landlord of the apartment around which the movie revolves trades human flesh to grains and lentils! An ex-clown finds a job at his place and gets going with his daughter, who is lost in her own very very haze world! A lady haunted by some weird voices howling in her head, puts so much brain in killing herself, just to see something going wrong with the plan, every other time! A whole bunch of maniacs who stay in the sewers and look for grains here and there. And all these stories very well knitted together in a delicately beautiful manner giving you that jittery laugh all the way through.

And it’s not only the fun tale that moves on and on, it is amazing in its own meaning. A satirical attempt as it looks from the surface of it and presentation in a critical manner makes it an irresistible name in your to-do list.

What more to say about this? This 1991 Jean-Pierre Jeunet ( Amelie Fame) Classic is a must see!

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0101700/

http://www.badmovies.org/movies/delicatessen/