Raining Thoughts

Pic Courtesy: Here Some things in life are as pointless as dogs peeing on random car tyres. It might not be as much of a necessity to the car owner, to have his car tyres peed on, as it is for the dog to demarcate its territory on a piece of asset that travels around a lot. The same thought applies to those uninvited geniuses who spend half their lives prying across the wall into the privacy of unwary people, unsuspectingly dazzling them with their hitherto unrevealed moral intelligence. However, what exactly they are trying to demarcate with their unsolicited wisdom still remains a mystery to that section of mankind stranded on the receiving end of their bounty. These morally super-intelligent beings are everywhere now. Breathing the air we breathe, viewing the very same sights we see, but perceiving a different and perhaps a more stimulating version of reality, which simply cannot be kept to the confines of their brilliant minds. They spew wisdom anywhere and ever

‘Kattappaaa!’, I animatedly yell at no one in particular from time to time. My empty war cries travel across the length and breadth of our apartment, only to collide with quizzical stares and die inaudible deaths. I believe there’s a vocal magnetism attached to the very name ‘Kattappa’ that triggers its utterance at alternating intervals of time. I am one of those late subscribers to the Bahubali franchise, who watched the beginning and the conclusion all on the same day, to overcome the so-called ‘handicap’ of not having savoured Rajamouli’s magnum opus motion picture, that the nation was obsessing about, only to become obsessed with Kattappa, the slave warrior, an epic all by himself. The protector and the destroyer, troubled by his self-imposed inner turmoil. Perhaps, a veteran Hamlet who has outgrown procrastination. No one could have essayed this iconic role better than Sathyaraj. There is a strangely satisfying exclamatory feel to the sound of Kattappa. The plosive phonetics

There is no movie which I can finitely claim as my best movie or a favourite. The finality of superlatives scares me. I have three movies in mind that I watched again this week, as I write. Three planets I re-visited. Each a planet with a pull of its own. Sudhir Mishra’s ‘Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi’ , (Hindi) set in the times of political turmoil of the 70s in India,  is not just the movie that gave me the ‘Shiny Ahuja problem’, as my husband has been jestingly calling it for nearly a decade now, or a tale of lament over unfulfilled dreams. It is an intense struggle of identities as the characters grapple with their individualities, beliefs, emotions, dreams and realities on a shifting landscape, drifting ahead to where life takes them inevitably, changing them forever. A gem of a movie that I can never stop loving. Some stories blur the fine line that divides fact from fantasy. Hariharan’s ‘Ennu Swantham Janakikutty’ (Malayalam) beautifully does that. Janakikutty’s charm li