There are no two ways about it, Moin Khan is a man with little insight, pathetic foresight, non-existent intelligence and atrocious double standards.
I have always meant to write about him, ever after he commented on Sachin in the most cowardly manner. I did comment on that article in passing in one of my earlier posts (the last para), but Moin’s continued double standards merited a more elaborate treatment.
I saw my first episode of Indian Idol today. I was actually watching Sachin and Dravid bat on the second day of the second test at Trent Bridge, but they were too wary and cautious to be putting up an interesting performance.
It was an open secret that Anu Malik is an idiot. After today’s episode, it is not a secret anymore. He wrongly commented on the personal life of one of the contestants (to Deepali, your crush is crushing your voice. How cheeky is that?!). When cornered by the righteous Alisha Chinai, he employed three different devices of rhetorics (stalling techniques, more accurately) to evade the issue and justify himself. It could have been four, but one of his techniques constituted of making completely irrelevant statements and my knowledge of rhetorics is too poor to place it.
Here is a passage directly from the 7th installment, except that I have changed “wand” to “wang!”
Hermione speaks …
“The Deathstick, the Wang of Destiny, they crop up under different names through the centuries, usually in the possession of some Dark wizard who’s boasting about them. Professor Binns mentioned some of them, but — oh it’s all nonsense. Wangs are only as powerful as the wizards who use them. Some wizards just like to boast that theirs are bigger and better than other people’s.”
There is one scene from Sympathy for Mr Vengeance which summarises why I like Park Chan-wook so much - Ryu sits in his dingy room helplessly while his ailing sister moans in pain and the boys next door masturbate listening to it.
But that’s not how he shows it. What we see is a row of masturbating young men who are trying to keep up their illusion by touching each other selectively and by looking at pornographic images put at the back of the guy in front. They have pressed their ears to the wall, and we can hear in the background what appears to be the moaning of an orgasm. The camera keeps drifting, and we have some time to think about the scene at hand to allow us to detach ourselves with casual deprecation. Then we come to Ryu’s room to find him sitting on a chair with the kind of detachment that can come only from utter despair, and we find his ailing sister moaning in pain on the floor.
Now we have to judge those young men again in light of our previous impression.
Just another scene calculated to shock? Yes, but there is more that Park Chan-wook conveys here. Those masturbating young men, they are not perverts, they are common human beings just like you and me. Their lives are our lives, and that is all there is to life.
Where does the true worth of a man lie? In his (creative) accomplishment? In his moral integrity?
I find it very paradoxical that a lot of how we judge a man in his own time has a lot to do with our perception of him, whereas in posterity he is judged by the value of his work, and all his personal characteristics go into the making of his legend.
I could be artistic. I could have artistry running through my veins. I could be an inartistic bastard too.
But I couldn’t accuse myself of inartistry, simply because inartistic doesn’t have a noun form.
There is no entry for inartistry in the dictionary!
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