Drops of Joy ...

A queer mix of a bunch of stories by Vaikom Muhammed Basheer in a play at Ranga Shankara.

The play showers you with loads of joy and freshness for the sheer ingenuity of its presentation.

The stories selected from countless of them that Basheer wrote faithfully reflects the soul of his writing, covering various ranges of human emotions in a setting of his own. Translating his writing into another language is very tricky, as most of the time the soul of the story is intricately linked to the writing style and language itself. Sprinkling it with Malayalam dialogs was a nice touch :-) it kept the stories closer to the way they were actually written.

The play experiments with the various schemes available for a play write to convey the story. With dialogs, without dialogs, with its nostalgic music, the narrator in the middle of the story in which he is a character himself and more. If you think of it, you can't do quite the same thing with movies, as they lack the sense of directness a play brings to the audience.

And the play abounds with cheerfully clever ideas to depict various elements of the stories. A bunch of old tyres stacked up for a well, Basheer's gramophone - a strange contraption made from scrap, plates for the gramophone records, palm leaf fans for twigs that Narayani throws up the jail wall, a curled up red cloth for the fire lit in a gas stove, and a garden hose for the 'Vishwa vikhyathamaya mookk' and no Mookkan himself!

Theres obviously much more to a play than just acting!

It must be immense satisfaction bowing to an audience thats clapping so much with joy and admiration.

:-)

The Art of Getting Lost ...

Trekking from Kodai to Munnar ...

Pursuit of happiness ...

How different is your happiness from mine?

What makes you happy may not do the same to me. What erodes you of your happiness may not have the same effect on me. This tends to give an idea that happiness is relative.

But is that really true?

I think not. Mostly human beings can only experience happiness in more or less the same way. Happiness as an emotion that people can experience is not relative. It rather probably has an absolute measure.

Consider this. When someone is most happy, there is not really a way for you to feel more happier than her by employing how many ever of the different devices at your disposal. So, there are probably different levels of happiness that you can experience, leading to this level of most happiness and unless your genetic wiring is not significantly different from other human beings, the happiness that you can experience at each level is more or less the same as others.

What really differs is what can make your happiness go up these levels. Some need to employ a lot of resources to achieve a particular level of happiness. But for some, seemingly simple things are able to push their mind up the happiness levels.

Now from simple economic principles, isn't employing fewer resources to achieve the same payback more efficient? ;-)

Then there is the question of sustaining happiness ... :-)

I hate all that silence ...

.....

No Beginning, No End ...

......

Threads, story telling, books with no pictures ...

Recently, I saw a play titled 'Arabian Night', by Silver Blue productions at the Alliance Francaise. The play unravels itself through five monologues, acted out by five people, sequentially yet simultaneously.

Each monologue represents five threads in the story. They are all part of the same story, progressing in their own line of existence. So each actor makes the mind follow the thread he or she owns, till their quanta of time expires and the mind has to stack it and shift to the next thread as it starts up from where it left off.

The threads do intertwine and the characters do interact. The playwright has nicely used time slice allocation to each thread for conveying this. When there is no interaction, each thread gets a large time slice, and takes me forward a large step through its story. When they are close together and are facing each other, the time slices get smaller, and smaller. Though the characters do talk to each other at these close encounters, the threads never completely lose their story teller posture. And at these times the mind goes to overdrive shifting between the threads, stacking and retrieving contexts that differ only minutely at present.

And there were very few props. So the entire setting is left to your imagination, even the physical separation or closeness between the characters and dimensions of the world in which they exist. I liked to be reminded that I used to like books without pictures better, when I was a kid.

One no-relation phrase that improbability drive brought into my mind as a result of this whole episode was the title of the final year project one of my seniors did, "communicating sequential processes."

:-)

Lightness of being ...

I call it the game of the eyes.

First it is tough to get her notice you. But somehow you've got to get there, a smile at an unexpected instant, a twitch and wobble of the nose, and maybe a 'wowed' mouth with bubbled eyes - now this one has to be done carefully so that any lesser mortals don't get a glimpse of this and deem you perpetually mad - might just work. So, you've got her attention, hold on to it for sometime. Now don't overdo it, she'll get bored and go away. Next thing is to look for a partial hiding place for your eyes. Well, but not a dungeon that her eyes can't reach without subverting laws of physics. Ok, now gently move your face into the hiding angle so that her eyes can't see your eyes. If you had had her interested enough, you can see she'll slowly move.

And there she is peeking out of the hiding angle and at your eyes! Make sure you smile.

Now you move to normal position. As per rules, she has to hide now and you'll seek. But rules are made to be bent, so you might have to hide again and again before she decides to do so.

If you see her smiling like a lotsa roses, the games a win-win :-)

Where do you belong ...

In Gladiator, the movie, the slave master Proximo says,

"So finally after five years of scratching a living in flea infested villages, we are finally going back to where we belong ... the Colosseum."

"Oh ... you should see the Colosseum! Spaniard,"

In my recent short trip home, I saw a small procession on the road. To do with continuous education and literacy campaign. And in front of that procession there was a group of 'chendakkar'. This suddenly made me remember this line from Gladiator. They looked kind of misfit in that setting, tarred road and banners, trying to make something, a living, out of their skill in percussion.

Would they feel a better sense of belonging if they are in 'Thaekkinkad Maithanam' instead, doing it for Thrissur pooram?

Where do I belong? ... :-)

Impact ...

You are alone in the coupe, you have switched off the lights and opened the windows, you are lying with your legs stretched and a bent torso, looking out into the black night flying past outside, overlooked by a foggy half moon. The constant, rhythmic, fast paced, very fast paced, clamor of the night train is rattling in your ears, and in your head and in your heart.

Everything outside looks so dark, an occasional dim light of a street lamp, and huge vastness of barren land.

You can not hear the roar of the approaching train, until its near, very near, just a few meters away from your window. And the roar rises in an instant, to a deafening blow. A blazing column of light hits you. The blazing column of light is streaking past the window, leaving a partially paralyzed you. Only things you can make out in that are streaks of light and deafening noises.

And its over in an instant and the black night is back in sleep.

One hundred years ...

She realized that Colonel Aureliano Buendia had not lost his love for the family because he had been hardened by the war, as she had thought before, but that he had never loved anyone, not even his wife Remedios or the countless one-night women who had passed through his life, and much less his sons. She sensed that he had fought so many wars not out of idealism as everyone had thought, nor had he renounced a certain victory because of fatigue, as everyone had thought, but that he had won and lost for the same reason, pure and sinful pride. She reached the conclusion that the son for whom she would have given her life was simply a man incapable of love. One night when she was carrying him in her belly she heard him weeping. It was such a definite lament that Jose Arcadio Buendia woke up beside her and was happy with the idea that his son is going to be a ventriloquist. Other people predicted that he would be a prophet. She, on the other hand, shuddered from the certainty that the deep moan was a first indication of the fearful pig tail and she begged God to let the child die in her womb. But the lucidity of her old age allowed her to see, and she said so many times, that the cries of children in their mother's wombs are not announcements of ventriloquism or a faculty for prophecy but an unmistakable sign of an incapacity of love. The lowering of the image of her son brought out in her all at once all of the compassion that she owed him. Amaranta, however, whose hardness of heart frightened her, whose concentrated bitterness made her bitter, suddenly became clear to her in the final analysis as the most tender woman who had ever existed, and she understood with pitying clarity that the unjust tortures to which she had submitted Pietro Crespi had not been dictated by a desire for vengeance, as everyone had thought, nor had the slow martyrdom with which she had frustrated the life of Colonel Gerinaldo Marquez been determined by the gall of her bitterness, as everyone had thought, but that both actions had been a mortal struggle between a measureless love and an invincible cowardice, and that the irrational fear that Amaranta had always had of her own tormented heart had triumphed in the end. It was during that time that Ursula began to speak Rebecca's name, bringing back the memory of her with an old love that was exalted by tardy repentance and a sudden admiration, coming to understand that only she, Rebecca, the one who had never fed of her milk but only of the earth of the land and the whiteness of the walls, the one who did not carry the blood of her veins in hers but the unknown blood of the strangers whose bones were still clocing in their grave, Rebecca, the one with an impatient heart, the one with a fierce womb, was the only one who had the unbridled courage that Ursula had wanted for her line.

--One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez.