Baboon Logic

Disclaimers:
1) Before my boredom takes over, I want to make clear that Ghajini is a decent time pass (I’ll list the USPs at the end of this post).
2) This contains a rough overview of the plot that can spoil the movie for you. There are some specifics of some scenes too.

Putting Ghajini into a genre

Ghajini is not Memento. Ghajini is the boy-meets-girl (and falls in love) story followed by boy-avenges-girl’s death rant. The non-linear unfolding of the narrative is superfluous because there is no surprise in the story and because it doesn’t serve any purpose except for tightening the pace. It’s a different movie altogether, with a different focus and a different niche, and it is entirely unnecessary to keep Memento in mind when thinking of it.

Ghajini is not Bollywood either. It has been reworked to Mumbai, but the screenplay wouldn’t have made much sense without its Southie (I think it’s called Kollywood!) motifs. For example, Asin plays the typical innocent bubbly girl with attractive simplicity (real life bimbo made larger than life on screen!). Obviously this is a character done to death in Bollywood, but they do it with a different kind of sensibility in South which you can see in this movie. The Goody Two-Shoes-ness of Asin might thus be a little jarring to the rest of India, but I am sure they will enjoy the bit where Aamir Khan subconsciously learns to drink tea in a pedestrian manner from her.

Ghajini is Kollywood in Bollywood clothes with the addition of Aamir Khan. It’s almost a scene by scene remake of the original except for a better paced and politically correct (or may be I should say cinematically correct!) ending.

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At the onset of his madness, Philip K Dick remarks on the protagonist of his loosely autobiographical novel VALIS (a novel that is at once brilliant and tedious, capturing the essence of Dick’s madness) that he could be happy only because he was perpetually occluded to what was to come, to his own future and to the consequences of his own actions!

That is how I see myself now. I am at the brink of losing my oldest friend. Even if he survives this, the severe strain our friendship has suffered will resolve itself to some terrible conclusion over time, and I can find happiness for the time being only in my incapacity to see ahead into the bleak future.

We can barely look at each other now in the guilty knowledge of what we have done together, and yet, that fateful evening began in the most promising manner.

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Finally I own a copy of Lolita.

When we were buying books for the Library in Chennai, I had looked around for a cheap edition of Lolita. We bought one for the library, of course, but I had wanted one for myself, but there were no cheap Indian editions.

Today waiting for someone, I decided to browse a book store I frequent, a book store now which I like more because it was a very small part of the only lunch date I have ever been to, and there I spotted an edition of Lolita by Penguin. Don’t imagine the ones with glossy covers. This one has the classical green and white Penguin cover and cheap brownish paper inside. But it’s worth it. The typeface is good with sharp contrast between the text and background paper and is something I would not mind looking often at.

Only yesterday I had to borrow two short phrases from the book and had wished I could sink into the first few pages of it. Today I have the book, but the mood is not there! This is what having a girl friend does to you. It replaces your lousy loser of a world full of all sorts of abstract crap with real life experiences so that you don’t have to turn to books to feel that you are alive!

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(The following account is true to the last embarrassing detail.)

I was too engrossed to notice the creaking of the bed room door when it opened, and it was not until the lights of the dining hall were switched on that I realised that someone was awake. Whoever it was, he had timed himself well to make sure that I could be caught at the most embarrassing moment of my midnight venture. A minute earlier, and I could have pretended to just about anything in the world. But there are very few things one could pretend to when one’s hands are full of that white syrupy liquid that all men at some point or the other have soiled themselves with.

I am not ashamed of admitting it. If I could say that I have a night-life, then this is my favourite midnight activity. And I am not ashamed of admitting it. Millions and millions of lonely men of all ages do this around the world, and there is no reason why I should be the one to be singled out to be made felt guilty about it. And I just don’t buy the crap that Real Men Don’t Do It! Everyone does it. Single men. Married men. Fathers of three kids. Anyone who can do this does it. Some men do pretend that they never did it in their entire lives, but everyone else knows better than to buy it.

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Note:
(1) This was written as a part of a deal, about three and half years back. I planned to revisit it sometime and make it into an actual story (the original deal was to write about a single day on a particular theme, though I have cheated anyway :)), but it is not happening any time soon, I am afraid.

(2) This is not autobiographical at all. I imagined a guy very different from myself writing this; so those of you who know me, don’t think of me when reading this, because the intended mood of the story is quite different. But had this piece been any good, I guess I would have claimed autobiographical influences. :)

(3) God knows that I have had enough trouble people reading themselves into my stories! Did I mention three unjustifiably broken friendships?! All girls! And it is not even me, always. Twice, the girls read my story and broke up their friendship(!) with other people!!! I guess they didn’t broke their friendship with me because we were not friends to start with (which, I’m ashamed to say, I have been thankful for). :)

Stump
———-
It is a stump now,
Its art gone,
Its ornaments all gone.

It does not stir with spring
Nor bend like a bow when green
Nor from its flowers fly KamaDeva’s arrows
Nor in its shades are sighs of travellers heard
Or tears of lovers seen.

Only one old bird
Sits remembering something.

‭(‬Translated from the Hindi of Suryakant Tripathy’s‭ “‬Nirala‭” ‬by Vikram Seth.‭)

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For quite some time now, the movie “Lovers of Six Years” has been sitting on my hard disk, with a view towards a possible screening if I ever booted into windows, because the official (and for that matter, many others that I downloaded) subtitle file (the one by Noir) was lagging. And mplayer didn’t work because apparently there is no Xvideo support for my video card :(.

So I set the video out to X11, and adjusted the subtitle file. In case anyone wants to know about it, +26700ms will fix the official Noir subtitle file.

Oh, and I tried KDE in the meantime, thinking that may be I should give the whole with-more-configurablity-comes-more-power thing a try. To be honest, I dumped KDE after logging into it only once, so this is not some serious criticism of KDE. It was so frigging slow that I knew I was never going to use it, so I made the decision without wasting any more time. And I have a P4 SSE3 processor with 1GB ram, so it’s not exactly a very slow machine.

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So I talked to The Wise One just now, and he had a few comments to offer. And one of them summed up my present state of mind neatly and very accurately – love seems to have replaced my clarity of vision and the blur of a perspective with a blur of vision and clarity of perspective!

I couldn’t agree more! And then I said that love seems like bipolar disorder, to sum up everything that he didn’t sum up. :)

Everyone who learns that I’m “open” to seeing a girl (not everyone is as well informed as my blog readers :)) has advice to offer, and more often than not, it is useless and weird.

My brother thought I was dating a guy until very recently.

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I have been all alone for the past few days in the house as everyone is on vaccation. Moved by the profoundity of my boredom, I turned to one of my old projects, and finally managed to translate the JAL code to PicBASIC. The point is, this time, it seems to be working, at least in the emulator! Hurrah for me. :)

So I am also finally ordering a pic programmer myself! I’ll try the code when it arrives, but I have a hunch that really building a complete kvasar will take a long time, because I suck at all that electrical stuff. And I am pretty sure there’ll be a lot to debug. I just hope I can find enough time to be jobless and bored like this. :)

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