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Rakht Charitra, Part II, 2010

Want to get your blood-pressure up even more?  Watch the second part of this two-part movie, and you can be assured of that.  This movie begins with the longest summary of the first part, but when it gets going, it really gets going.  Long story short:  the good guy becomes the bad guy; the bad guy’s son appears to become the good guy; and these roles continue to alternate throughout this long saga of the two families’ political vendettas.

What is right and what is not is all very relative when revenge is the only motivation to act and to react.  Thanks to the shocking and very graphic violence from the first movie, over the course of the next two hours, blood pressure notwithstanding, one does tend to become somewhat desenitized to the gruesome manner in which people are slaughtered left, right and center. 

The cycle of revenge is a vicious one, but it doesn’t have to be an eternal one.  This is the implication that one may draw if one wishes from the very last scene– which is the young mother tending to her baby boy who will grow up to be fatherless.  Unless, of course, the spirit of the Mahabharat is so pervasive as to drive him to seek vengeance yet again.  The Mahabharat is invoked on the billboards of this movie with the legend “Revenge is the purest emotion”, and I wonder how great an influence this is on the minds of the viewers, especially in India, who might very well view this statement to be a justification for perpetrating this gross falsehood.  A falsehood, because in my humble opinion, there are emotions even more purer and undiluted than this emotion called revenge which is nothing more than a base, visceral instinct.  One emotion that I’ll just throw out there is something called love from which stems a concept called forgiveness.  Try it on for size sometime, is what I’d like to tell those two warring families!

And yet, from the artistic point of view, this is certainly a movie for the files.  With a brilliant screenplay and cinematography, as well as exemplary performances by virtually every actor, it is not so much the story but the imagery of these two movies that will stay with you for a long time. 

Rakht-charitra-2

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The Titanic Launched 100 Years Ago Today

Posted at 09:37 AM ET, 05/31/2011

Titanic launched 100 years ago today

By Elizabeth Flock


On May 31, 1911, the British liner Titanic slipped into the water for the first time. Nearly a year later, on April 10, 1912, it sailed out of Southampton, England, at the start of its doomed voyage (pictured above). (AP) On May 31, 1911, the finest liner in the world and the heaviest object ever moved by man was launched into Belfast’s River Lagan.

Shipbuilder Harland & Wolff’s shipyard was a flurry of activity that day, with special grandstands constructed for important guests, a cursory inspection of the ship by H&W partner Lord Pirrie, and an inch of tallow and soap used to lubricate the slipway for the liner.

The RMS Titanic was still incomplete. The massive hull with engines and boilers had none of the finished luxurious rooms that would later become a hallmark of the ship. But after three years of round-the-clock work by 3,000 Irishmen, the liner was going into the water all the same.

“We just builds ‘em, and shove ‘em in,” a shipyward worker said that day.

As ‘Good Luck’ flags fluttered, and rockets were fired, the supporting timbers were knocked free. Workers leapt from under the hull as the enormous beauty slipped into River Lagan.

The “unsinkable” Titanic was in the water, and it was floating high.

A shipyard worker, James Dobbins, was injured by falling timbers during the launch, but few noticed as celebrations began in earnest at the city’s Grand Central Hotel. Dobbins died later that day, the first indication that something might not be just right with the liner.

In Belfast today, 100 years later, a religious service is being held at the Harland & Wolff shipyard to mark the anniversary.

No survivors of the sunk Titanic remain. The last living survivor — Millvina Dean, who was eight weeks old when the ship set sail — died at 97 in June 2009.

Titanic12

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Technology Provides an Alternative to Love – Excerpt from Jonathan Franzen's Commencement Speech

I was, in short, infatuated with my new device. I’d been similarly infatuated with my old device, of course; but over the years the bloom had faded from our relationship. I’d developed trust issues with my Pearl, accountability issues, compatibility issues and even, toward the end, some doubts about my Pearl’s very sanity, until I’d finally had to admit to myself that I’d outgrown the relationship.

Do I need to point out that — absent some wild, anthropomorphizing projection in which my old BlackBerry felt sad about the waning of my love for it — our relationship was entirely one-sided? Let me point it out anyway.

Let me further point out how ubiquitously the word “sexy” is used to describe late-model gadgets; and how the extremely cool things that we can do now with these gadgets — like impelling them to action with voice commands, or doing that spreading-the-fingers iPhone thing that makes images get bigger — would have looked, to people a hundred years ago, like a magician’s incantations, a magician’s hand gestures; and how, when we want to describe an erotic relationship that’s working perfectly, we speak, indeed, of magic.

Let me toss out the idea that, as our markets discover and respond to what consumers most want, our technology has become extremely adept at creating products that correspond to our fantasy ideal of an erotic relationship, in which the beloved object asks for nothing and gives everything, instantly, and makes us feel all powerful, and doesn’t throw terrible scenes when it’s replaced by an even sexier object and is consigned to a drawer.

To speak more generally, the ultimate goal of technology, the telos of techne, is to replace a natural world that’s indifferent to our wishes — a world of hurricanes and hardships and breakable hearts, a world of resistance — with a world so responsive to our wishes as to be, effectively, a mere extension of the self.

Let me suggest, finally, that the world of techno-consumerism is therefore troubled by real love, and that it has no choice but to trouble love in turn.

Its first line of defense is to commodify its enemy. You can all supply your own favorite, most nauseating examples of the commodification of love. Mine include the wedding industry, TV ads that feature cute young children or the giving of automobiles as Christmas presents, and the particularly grotesque equation of diamond jewelry with everlasting devotion. The message, in each case, is that if you love somebody you should buy stuff.

A related phenomenon is the transformation, courtesy of Facebook, of the verb “to like” from a state of mind to an action that you perform with your computer mouse, from a feeling to an assertion of consumer choice. And liking, in general, is commercial culture’s substitute for loving. The striking thing about all consumer products — and none more so than electronic devices and applications — is that they’re designed to be immensely likable. This is, in fact, the definition of a consumer product, in contrast to the product that is simply itself and whose makers aren’t fixated on your liking it. (I’m thinking here of jet engines, laboratory equipment, serious art and literature.)

But if you consider this in human terms, and you imagine a person defined by a desperation to be liked, what do you see? You see a person without integrity, without a center. In more pathological cases, you see a narcissist — a person who can’t tolerate the tarnishing of his or her self-image that not being liked represents, and who therefore either withdraws from human contact or goes to extreme, integrity-sacrificing lengths to be likable.

If you dedicate your existence to being likable, however, and if you adopt whatever cool persona is necessary to make it happen, it suggests that you’ve despaired of being loved for who you really are. And if you succeed in manipulating other people into liking you, it will be hard not to feel, at some level, contempt for those people, because they’ve fallen for your shtick. You may find yourself becoming depressed, or alcoholic, or, if you’re Donald Trump, running for president (and then quitting).

Consumer technology products would never do anything this unattractive, because they aren’t people. They are, however, great allies and enablers of narcissism. Alongside their built-in eagerness to be liked is a built-in eagerness to reflect well on us. Our lives look a lot more interesting when they’re filtered through the sexy Facebook interface. We star in our own movies, we photograph ourselves incessantly, we click the mouse and a machine confirms our sense of mastery.

And, since our technology is really just an extension of ourselves, we don’t have to have contempt for its manipulability in the way we might with actual people. It’s all one big endless loop. We like the mirror and the mirror likes us. To friend a person is merely to include the person in our private hall of flattering mirrors.

I may be overstating the case, a little bit. Very probably, you’re sick to death of hearing social media disrespected by cranky 51-year-olds. My aim here is mainly to set up a contrast between the narcissistic tendencies of technology and the problem of actual love. My friend Alice Sebold likes to talk about “getting down in the pit and loving somebody.” She has in mind the dirt that love inevitably splatters on the mirror of our self-regard.

The simple fact of the matter is that trying to be perfectly likable is incompatible with loving relationships. Sooner or later, for example, you’re going to find yourself in a hideous, screaming fight, and you’ll hear coming out of your mouth things that you yourself don’t like at all, things that shatter your self-image as a fair, kind, cool, attractive, in-control, funny, likable person. Something realer than likability has come out in you, and suddenly you’re having an actual life.

Suddenly there’s a real choice to be made, not a fake consumer choice between a BlackBerry and an iPhone, but a question: Do I love this person? And, for the other person, does this person love me?

There is no such thing as a person whose real self you like every particle of. This is why a world of liking is ultimately a lie. But there is such a thing as a person whose real self you love every particle of. And this is why love is such an existential threat to the techno-consumerist order: it exposes the lie.

This is not to say that love is only about fighting. Love is about bottomless empathy, born out of the heart’s revelation that another person is every bit as real as you are. And this is why love, as I understand it, is always specific. Trying to love all of humanity may be a worthy endeavor, but, in a funny way, it keeps the focus on the self, on the self’s own moral or spiritual well-being. Whereas, to love a specific person, and to identify with his or her struggles and joys as if they were your own, you have to surrender some of your self.

The big risk here, of course, is rejection. We can all handle being disliked now and then, because there’s such an infinitely big pool of potential likers. But to expose your whole self, not just the likable surface, and to have it rejected, can be catastrophically painful. The prospect of pain generally, the pain of loss, of breakup, of death, is what makes it so tempting to avoid love and stay safely in the world of liking.

And yet pain hurts but it doesn’t kill. When you consider the alternative — an anesthetized dream of self-sufficiency, abetted by technology — pain emerges as the natural product and natural indicator of being alive in a resistant world. To go through a life painlessly is to have not lived. Even just to say to yourself, “Oh, I’ll get to that love and pain stuff later, maybe in my 30s” is to consign yourself to 10 years of merely taking up space on the planet and burning up its resources. Of being (and I mean this in the most damning sense of the word) a consumer.

When I was in college, and for many years after, I liked the natural world. Didn’t love it, but definitely liked it. It can be very pretty, nature. And since I was looking for things to find wrong with the world, I naturally gravitated to environmentalism, because there were certainly plenty of things wrong with the environment. And the more I looked at what was wrong — an exploding world population, exploding levels of resource consumption, rising global temperatures, the trashing of the oceans, the logging of our last old-growth forests — the angrier I became.

Finally, in the mid-1990s, I made a conscious decision to stop worrying about the environment. There was nothing meaningful that I personally could do to save the planet, and I wanted to get on with devoting myself to the things I loved. I still tried to keep my carbon footprint small, but that was as far as I could go without falling back into rage and despair.

BUT then a funny thing happened to me. It’s a long story, but basically I fell in love with birds. I did this not without significant resistance, because it’s very uncool to be a birdwatcher, because anything that betrays real passion is by definition uncool. But little by little, in spite of myself, I developed this passion, and although one-half of a passion is obsession, the other half is love.

And so, yes, I kept a meticulous list of the birds I’d seen, and, yes, I went to inordinate lengths to see new species. But, no less important, whenever I looked at a bird, any bird, even a pigeon or a robin, I could feel my heart overflow with love. And love, as I’ve been trying to say today, is where our troubles begin.

Because now, not merely liking nature but loving a specific and vital part of it, I had no choice but to start worrying about the environment again. The news on that front was no better than when I’d decided to quit worrying about it — was considerably worse, in fact — but now those threatened forests and wetlands and oceans weren’t just pretty scenes for me to enjoy. They were the home of animals I loved.

And here’s where a curious paradox emerged. My anger and pain and despair about the planet were only increased by my concern for wild birds, and yet, as I began to get involved in bird conservation and learned more about the many threats that birds face, it became easier, not harder, to live with my anger and despair and pain.

How does this happen? I think, for one thing, that my love of birds became a portal to an important, less self-centered part of myself that I’d never even known existed. Instead of continuing to drift forward through my life as a global citizen, liking and disliking and withholding my commitment for some later date, I was forced to confront a self that I had to either straight-up accept or flat-out reject.

Which is what love will do to a person. Because the fundamental fact about all of us is that we’re alive for a while but will die before long. This fact is the real root cause of all our anger and pain and despair. And you can either run from this fact or, by way of love, you can embrace it.

When you stay in your room and rage or sneer or shrug your shoulders, as I did for many years, the world and its problems are impossibly daunting. But when you go out and put yourself in real relation to real people, or even just real animals, there’s a very real danger that you might love some of them.

And who knows what might happen to you then?  

Jonathan Franzen is the author, most recently, of “Freedom.” This essay is adapted from a commencement speech he delivered on May 21 at Kenyon College.

 via nytimes.com 

Jf

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irrational streams of blood…

First published in my private blog the summer of 2009 following a lovely trip to Niagara Falls.  The picture taken is one of several such impossibly perfect shots.

The Gyres
–William Butler Yeats

The gyres! the gyres! Old Rocky Face, look forth;
Things thought too long can be no longer thought,
For beauty dies of beauty, worth of worth,
And ancient lineaments are blotted out.
Irrational streams of blood are staining earth;
Empedocles has thrown all things about;
Hector is dead and there’s a light in Troy;
We that look on but laugh in tragic joy.
What matter though numb nightmare ride on top,
And blood and mire the sensitive body stain?
What matter? Heave no sigh, let no tear drop,
A-greater, a more gracious time has gone;
For painted forms or boxes of make-up
In ancient tombs I sighed, but not again;
What matter? Out of cavern comes a voice,
And all it knows is that one word “Rejoice!’
Conduct and work grow coarse, and coarse the soul,
What matter? Those that Rocky Face holds dear,
Lovers of horses and of women, shall,
From marble of a broken sepulchre,
Or dark betwixt the polecat and the owl,
Or any rich, dark nothing disinter
The workman, noble and saint, and all things run
On that unfashionable gyre again.

Niagarafalls

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049/365/01

Hostas everywhere.  This size of leaf is particularly attractive, I think…

Paanlikehostas

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Fizzy Mango Lassi: A Must For the Summertime!

Lassi is a traditional summertime Indian drink that is served either sweet or savory.  Essentially buttermilk whipped up and seasoned with salt or sugar, you have a satisfying cool drink to beat the heat of the great northern Indian plains. 

Over time, there have been many variations to the lassi, one of the most common ones being the Mango Lassi, which is essentially, mango juice or mango pulp added to either buttermilk/yogurt/milk. 

Ml

Well, I’ve invented my own variation of the Mango Lassi which is adding a carbonated lemony sugar-free beverage to half a glass of mango pulp on the rocks.  The result, btw, is AAAHHHHHmazing!
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Memorial Day 2011

Honor and tribute / To all our fallen heroes / On Memorial Day!

Note on picture:  A beautiful white flowering bush on the campus area downtown where we were lucky to find street parking on this holiday!

Memday2011

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Rakht Charitra, Part I, 2010

I thought I’d seen it all in Hindi cinema until I saw *this* movie.  I realized then that I’d seen nothing at all.  Nothing about the violent law of the jungle as it is portrayed in this story dripping with so much blood and gore, I literally had to look away several times as the cold-blooded slaughter of ordinary people took place with scythes, daggers, knives, and guns of every kind.  This is one heck of a motion picture, and it isn’t for the faint-hearted.  It is not your standard Bollywood masala-movie by any stretch of the imagination, and you watch it at your own risk of becoming mildly nauseated to utterly stunned at the constant blood-letting every which where you look.  And it isn’t only the murders that take place with mathematical and clock-like precision, it is also the literal heavy-handedness in how the men treat their women.

So intense in violence is this political saga in the heart of a rural setting in the southern part of India that you wonder if this is how it is everywhere in the country.  The story is as fast-paced as it can get, the characters are spine-chilling in their persona and delivery, and the background music and cinematography is absolutely brilliant.  There are no good-looking people singing in the rain or looking forlorn at the clouds.  This is raw revenge that is sought time and time again in such Shakespearian proportions that there is no escaping the fear and utter despair that comes from a life like this.  Is there hope for change?  I don’t know.  But I hear there’s a Part II to this story, so I can only hope that there will be hope!

Rc