B-Log

Reading Dickinson in the Bare All Age A major point of debate at present among the trend watchers is the rising tendency to bare it all. The long existed fencing which respected the division between private and the public has been punched into a sieve. A sieve which permits uninhibited flow two ways. The flow has unproblematised the two categories which we have always attempted to keep apart: the private and the public. With the advent of the so christened social media, the life inside had begun to take a beating. With a decade of social media behind us, the beating it took has totally deshaped the private space. With result that not only has the private shrunk to the real inside of the mind, with the physical and lived part of the life has become public. When the expansionist agenda of the public pushes mercilessly forward, aided by the unashamedly openness seeking social media, the outcome can't be otherwise.  It hardly matters what Emily Dickinson thought. Keeping asi

Jagathi Sreekumar, the actor has retired for the time being. A motor accident has wrecked havoc with his mind. He has travelled beyond the din of the actual into a calm of the within. He goes through the motions. Let us hope that there will be more light at the end of the tunnel, that the comedian nonpareil for the Malayalees will return us to quality laughter.  Quality laughter is a complex term, as it is a slippery feel. if humour is the process and laughter the product, as the theorists say, then quality laughter must be the result of quality humour.  The blank which Jagathy has left behind is a yawning divide in the lives of the average Keralite who loved a good laugh, but rarely at the expense of the female of the species. The miss of the real is felt when we have to live with the kind of replacements which have materialised in the guise of comedians. When the quintessential humour gives way to pedestrian buffoonery, pathos of the viewer bring the memories o

Ads have ad-on value. Or they should. Considering the quantum of time of a television viewer or a magazine reader that ads snatch away, it should have. The other day exigency tied me down to a channel. Having left the remote kilometres away, forgetfulness turns the clock back by a decade kind of. Since mobility has been mortgaged to the couch potato pleasure, there was the unease of having to get up to escape ads. Rooted to the comfort of the visually sedated, I was exposed to forgettable ads which were, to add to the insult, repeated. One ad paraded an experiment. A washing competition in which a surf Excel wins hands down. An ad which makes one take a look at the calendar to check the century one belongs to! Another one had three creams from three countries and the the one for which the ad is made won it lock, stock and barrel. These were repeated twice or thrice during each break. For a viewer who is already taxed by the effort having to watch a movie which stretches the limits

Shopping Love There was a stage when it became fashionable for the apparently educated to argue that things are ideas. If a writer stated that a country is an idea, then a star followed suit by opining that age is an idea. Everything became states of mind. It was easy to keep off the beaten track and claim exception through this act of ideation. Will it be possible now to claim that shopping too is an idea, a state of mind ? There is a question which seems to be a standard one when the interviewee happens to be a celebrity of the cinematic kind.  The query is, 'Do you love shopping?' Though not all the celebrities declare their passions for shopping , general feel is that they love it. Can shopping be something one loves like listening to music or walking, like reading or helping others? People who love reading read and it has its innumerable positives. Those who travel or those who paint too can claim similar dividends for their passions. But what do the people who love

Sky is what lets one be with its hazy ungivens. Lots of apprehensions can be washed off the mind only if one dares to glance the blue above for long. Sky lends its egalitarian stability, it infuses expansiveness too. Sky speaks to you in the language of the possibilities. Sky lets you be as one among the flakes around. Sky pushes every hopeful mind into a frenzy  of quietening ethos. Sky delights you with the fact that you can make an object of your gaze, without any need to do anything physical. Sky lets you be united with it through the vapourous union. Don't take my sky away. When I liberate myself from the sleeping cell of nights and put myself out, put my feet up, it is the nonchalance of the morning sky which lets me wake into the sleep. The minuscule me is sedated into calming sense of unreality by the same sky too. When it wraps itself in a blanket of darkness, the sky lets me change heart. As the climate change makes the sky more unpredictable, mixing fog and rain and

Walk your mind. Take it out.  Refence the thoughts. Quarantine the familiar.  Gather thought implements and push it up the the attic. Let go.  Disconnect the premises. Pour in a fresh can of energiser. Let the mind loose. Let go. Reload the people. Relocate the me. Recraft the possibility tangent. Reengineer the thought processes. Recolour the walls. Remix the doors. Reposition the windows. Remake you. Let go.  Repeople the mindscape. Redress the world around. Rework on the hypotheses. Remark the processes. Rewonder at the benign simplicities. Rebreathe the passion around. Let go. Relay the roads. Rewander the by lanes. Rewater the fruits.  Let go.  Reposition your guards. Recan your worms. Redress your memories. Refresh your belly. Relearn your teachings. Let go. Rewrite your speeches. Rerhyme your prose. Reword your fate. Let go.  Rewet your consciousness. Repeal your dreams. Relose you. Rewin the loss.  Reengineer the body. Rewi

It is universal, apparently immortal too, to blame the young for not learning form the old. Each senior generation finds it hard to figure out the inability on the part of the young to read the old right and get their lives straight. Education to romance, careers to commerce, driving to digitalising, the areas of disagreement are as multiple as there are passions and prejudices. When there are those who have already taken the path and ready to look back and take stock, to comment, analyse and articulate, it is pretty simple for the young to learn from it. How come they don't do that ? When the been-there-done-that species of the past is ready to educate the ones getting ready to arrive, why do they turn their backs on it and decide to go it alone? Think that it happens. That the young have made a manual of what the previous generations have done and been doing, and have schematised the rights and the wrongs, and have decided take on life fully loaded with these insights, how d

Have we once and for all turned to a future in which what matters is just what we do, and not who we are? Are we taking our learning as merely a ground for preparing ourselves to a career- determined future? Will the benchmarks of correctness and professionalism steer us away into a world where we will live rest of the lives in three piece suits with ever turned on smiles? Will the only concerns of our young who frequent institutions of higher education will be to act and to talk in a way that they will look right as per the employability manual? Will the fear of not being employed , not selected for the prospective job, hurt them into a kind of docility and domesticity which is equivalent to a premature maturity that denies adventure and promotes only ventures? What provokes these questions are the career fixation and apoliticisation which are increasingly becoming quietly acceptable in our campuses. In a number of ways, it is becoming clear that Generation Y is taking o

I have never had the whole traffic blocked so that me, my vehicle, can pass. I have never had my document altered so that I can claim to posses a pice of land which I. Fact belongs to the government. I have never kick backs for doing what I should do as a natural part of my responsibility. None buttered my fingers and made me sing on the line so that a company can make profits. I never looked the other way and claimed the stink doesn't exist when a whole town was corrupted because of the pollution of the city. I never looked the other way when the commerce of a holy city impressed up on me tang I should have more faith in the moolah than the mankind. I never denied what every dog on the road knows when naked political murders happen. I never denied when naked community inspired violence occurs. I never sought shelter under the mask of propriety and expedience, after doing what is plain dirty. I never sought an entry into a committee on the sheer weight of the colour of my poli

I didnt know that Anna dies in the movie 'Annayum Rasoolum' till I watched the end of the movie the other day. Before that I have seen Rasool,stalking Anna. on another occasion Anna giving into the pursuit of Rasool. On yet another TV surf , I saw him land in Ponnani(?) after being involved in the clashes with the family of the girl. Then once I caught them moving to a new home and Anna living the waiting part for her man to return after work. This is how i lived through the patches of the movie piecemeal basis. Though that statement makes it read like a deliberate act, as if I have cut myself off intentionally far from cinematic truth. The truth was that sometimes the ad factor, often the travelling remote controller, occasionally the visitors, sometimes forgetfulness, may be running after a domestic errand, an abrupt call - these denied me, perhaps fortunately,  the rest of the movie. But that afforded me the advantage of living through a spectrum of possib