Ākāśāt Patitaṃ: Many Forms, One Reality

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Adi Shankara: The image that's stayed with me forever Sanskrit and shlokas have always fascinated me. The sheer vastness of Sanskrit literature is humbling. There are enough verses, texts, commentaries and traditions to occupy many lifetimes, and still leave one feeling that one has barely scratched the surface. But I didn't think much about any of this when I was growing up. I would recite shlokas in the morning and evening without fail. They were simply part of life. The words were there, the rituals were there, the temples were there—but much of it happened in the background. I was busy with academics. There was no time for Sanskrit or Vedanta. At least, that is what I used to tell myself. Of course, time was never really the problem. I could spend five days watching a Test match from morning to evening and somehow consider that perfectly legitimate use of my time! The truth was simpler: Sanskrit and Vedanta had not yet become priorities. Gr...
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Emotion(less)!

Last week, we had a discussion about the different facets of emotion in human beings. The movie field is a fascinating field just because it is such an important source of entertainment for the common man. Of course, it has its share of controversies and other big issues, but over a period of time, it has emerged as an important industry in terms of revenue. Movie business is really big money.

Getting back on track about emotions and movies, where is the relation? We have our special actors and actresses who gladden our hearts during those two hours, and we are taken to an ethereal world, where imagination takes over everything in an atmosphere filled with pure gloss. This is when we felt how difficult it is for newcomers to cope up with this profession. Any actor has to display various emotions in those two hours, which actually would have taken months of filming involving different artists, and at the end of the day, he has to come out unscathed from the reel life experience. That is too professional to believe. The actors have to say those hushy-mushy dialogues, embrace each other, articulate as if the whole life is dependent on the other, get into deep love figuring out ways to live, and almost magically after those two hours(rather after months) come out of it, and get into another movie, enact the same things with totally different set of actors (m)uttering the same set of dialogues. That is totally complicated for a normal being not to fall for the opposite sex after so much of cajoling and coaxing. Obviously, the actors get used to it over a period of time, but what about the initial phase of your career. It is unthinkable that two people would not fall in love after what happens on the movie sets.

We conjure different kinds of emotions with different kinds of people. According to me, it is too difficult to visualise the impact that it would have on the other person when one is undergoing this bizarre transformation from one movie to the other. The same analogy can be applied to real life too. It is too difficult to get close to a person and then abruptly get away without an impact. Applying this thought to the real life process, it is no wonder that we are bigger artists in the real world than the reel world. This bizzare discussion on the movie industry quickly led to various intricate complications in real life, and we decided that emotional turmoil is just not confined to a single industry. It is inherent in life as a whole. At the end of the day, it is good to be emotionless and treat any impact on life to be meaningless and unnecessary. Life just goes on and so do the movies!

Comments

  1. AnonymousMarch 16, 2007 at 9:20 AM

    Personally, my emotions wax and wane less these days. Until the wife asks for more money.

    ReplyDelete

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