NavDharmyug

After a too hectic fortnight, finally settled on the expanded couch with my three year old to watch the re run of The Revenge of Fallen-Transformer, on lazy Sunday. Some times to think of out, our childhood was pretty deprived in the sense that we never had such movies in those times. Wonderful theme, wonderful performance and marvellous dialogues like ," Sam, fate rarely chooses us at the time of our choosing." I believe such words are way too portions for the age at which the movie is targeted but out would be wonderful if kids at that age could put some mind about it, to pause and ponder. I sometime do feel many of these jewels I would have missed, had it not been for my daughter. As she grows and get little selective about movies she wants to watch on Sunday mornings, I have already started missing those popcorn laden Sundays, she to my surprise refused to go watch Batman last weekend in favour of shopping trip with her mother. I do wonder in a tiny sorrow as feminist tr...

   Christopher Nolan has created or rather attempted to maintain the historical expectations set by earlier versions of the Batman, with Dark Knight Rises. "The Dark Knight Rises" on the hot weekend afternoon, watched alone, in a multiplex, PVR-Priya in Delhi,resembling old style movie theater, with On line tickets, to be collected in print, in line, in the quest out in the open Sun at its best of ferocity, with longest queue there for on line ticket collection, brings, brought back the days of whistling and charged up audience (I do however wonder, if railways can do with SMS tickets, why PVR can not do it with that). However, at certain age, such theater present great fun. Still remember the sense of accomplishment as we collected more than dozen tickets at one go, fighting the crowds on what actually was a ticket window at six in the morning at Raiput theater, something you can not imagine in plush, airconditioned Multiplexes of the day....

While we think of God, we think of Justice. Justice and righteousness is something we consider as inherent in the Idea of god. We see a great deal of injustice around in the world and when we are unable to explain and rationalize the same, we lean on the idea of God. Man is a rational animal, his being is an exercise to understand the world around him, the plight to understand and explain things around him is his raison d'etre for a Man. Man tries to understand the world around him and tries to arrange it in a cycle of imaginary Cause and Effect. Anything which he is unable to understand and therefore, explain, causes discomfiture, and he failing to find any reason to assign to an event, and unable to bear to cruelty of truth in the brutal hopelessness in the words of Somerset Maugham when he says, The rain fell alike upon the just and upon the unjust, and for nothing was there a why and a wherefore. assigns all that is inexplicable to an entity called God. The idea of God has su...

The times sure have passed, since the time I used to walk long walk through tremendously, hot path to the university gymnasium in the College, to my first fall in the year after the marriage, where in I escaped precariously from being "late" to the time of self-pity and self-loathing, to a recovery against the prennial worry of never to be be the old self again even after kicking the butt and getting off the butt. The king of the house was de-throned, aging and fattening advisor with self-doubt and self-pity, aplenty. The important thing which such catastrophic events that put you into an ICU brings you different perspective, it brings in a sense of mortality as a part of life. You understand that death in nothing but one step sideways and that how so insignificant your own being is to life. If I had not come out of that ICU on that fateful night, life would have gone by as it has, without me to poke my nose into its course. Well, as fate would have it, I did come out ...

For men, what they do is the inevitable second question in social interaction and being in-between job is not an inspiring answer. It puts a question mark on their very existence, what does a man exist for if not to provide for those who depend on him, just as what does a woman exist for if not to love and fulfil the emotional hollowness of a man? The man who just lost his name and has become a number on the list has no clue on how to respond to this sudden change in his existence. Lists are cruel, cold-hearted and top-down. One can not talk or reason with a list. The name as an individual gives an opportunity to counter, convince and cajole; The number as an individual takes away all those opportunity. It looks less of a judgement on your capability, more like the outcome of a faltering dice thrown up in the air. You can argue with a reason, you can not with the stroke of misfortune. The government of the da...

The dust, the traffic and eternal construction of Bangalore not withstanding, the city to me has always been fun to visit, more so, in summer when the calm and embalming Bangalore whether is even more drastically differentiated than the sweltering and cruel heat of Delhi summer. A day spent with customers, with absolutely promising discussions over lovely dinner, culminated to the designation of best of the days as I got call from my old college friend while coming back to my hotel, Taj Westend, ensconced in the wonderful forest like greenery. Reaching back in the hotel, after picking him up , we say down for a long chat over a small drink of single malt. I took a long look at him, he looks a happy man though complains of discrimination at work, on account of region, language and all, worried that his career progression might not be keeping pace with his hairs going silver. I remember, as we chat about his modest career growth and my absolutely absurd financial pragmatism, of the y...

A story was cooking, pungent smelling about a father on the edge, loosing memory hit with something like Alzheimer. It started well, going backwards, as a daughter struggles to bring back her father from the edge of understanding to life as we know it for whatever of it might be left for them together. It is story which is well..a story, that too an unfinished one, but as my four year old sit by my side, and tells me of a even smaller kid, Garvin in her summer school, while running through the pictures in her storybook, the story seems so real. It could be something like what famed psychologist, Shawn Achor referred to in a wonderful TED talk on positive psychology as medical school syndrome, where in simply on account of being surrounded by so many diseases, one starts believing, one has them. Could it be that when you write about calamities that befall on the character, you somehow start believing yourself to be living through those all those calamities in life, and sometime throug...