When the Building Came Alive

Image
Kasturi Dhama Apartments — the play area where many evenings came alive. The lights would go out without warning. For a brief second, the entire building would fall silent. Then, from somewhere in Kasturi Dhama Apartments, a chorus would erupt. “Yayyy!” It is difficult to imagine children celebrating a power failure today. But in the Bangalore of the nineties and early 2000s, a power cut did not always feel like an inconvenience. Especially in the late evenings, it felt like permission. Permission to stop whatever we were doing, leave the darkness inside our homes, and step into the building outside. Before Kasturi Dhama became home, we had moved through a few different parts of Bangalore. My family had begun in Srirampuram and Vyalikaval before gradually cementing ourselves in Malleswaram for the next few decades. My earliest memory is of living in a vatara —a Kannada word loosely used for a building or a cluster of homes—on 15th Cross, near Karur Vy...
4 comments

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

Post a Comment