PHOONK - A True horror!

The Ram Gopal Varma flick, 'PHOONK' comes from a banner called, ‘ OneMorethought Productions’ and I guess something seriously went wrong with the spellings; as it had to be ‘NoMoreThought Productions’.'Phoonk' is doing very well in the theaters, and the Telugu Version of it doing well too. RGV has all reasons to smile, and he has already made his plans for the sequels of this latest master piece.

RGV's 'Company' was pretty good and highly watchable though the plot was stolen from the movie 'Wannabe' and the score from the movie 'Payback', but 'Phoonk' turned out to be a real horror and the safe release and the successful running of it in our theaters raise serious questions.

Few of them are,

• What's our sensor board doing?
  
• Why do we find a movie like 'Phoonk' interesting?
  
• Where are we heading to?
  

RGV and his crew are happy in introducing the black magic to the world of Cinema. His Celebrations sound more like the bram stoker's rejoice of the 1890's when Dracula was released to the readers of the dreaded dark Victorian Era terrorising them to their spines. Hundreds of years passed and technology has grown cent fold and we are still ready to accept a movie like 'Phoonk'? (Question: if you can take 'Exorcist' and 'Omen' , cant you take 'Phoonk'? Answer : We Indian Cine goers, unlike our western counterparts, has got a nasty habit of getting confused with the reel and real life. One can easily see instances where our reel-heroes becoming the ministers of the state milking their reel image. )

It’s a horrible experience watching , a dreadfully dangerous piece of dirt like ''Phoonk' gets released easily in India and even getting re-made in to another languages. That too first into Telugu? is it because the Telugu intellectuality questionable in the south?

What's this movie all about?

Story line is very funny. Must be written by a school boy with the help of his great grand mother in her death bed.

A happy and successful Construction engineer is the Main Male character in the movie who happened to be a hard core Atheist. Plot unveils showing, how this character who denies even the very existence of God, fails miserably to the unexplainable power of black magic and evil forces and realizes that there is something in the world to which, rationality cannot be applied and ends up in accepting the divine power of Almighty and his religion. His metamorphosis is because of the evil worship and black magic of his enemies targeting his loving cute daughter. He tries his level best with modern science and psychiatry and fails in curing her as she was not infected by a virus but what she had was a 'Boot Sanchar' . Life of his daughter was important, so he goes for the counter magic against the black magic and finally saves his daughter killing the devil worshippers. Beautiful, indeed. And can he go free ,after killing two people for doing devil worship? He can , as this is India and we still live in the mindset of 17th century.

'Phoonk' has got a clean set of good men, good women and another set of evil brigade using black magic against the good. And a Divine intervention of an insane looking tantric saves the good men from the unholy setup. And the real villain is ,the central male character of the movie who dismisses the false belief, forcing everyone to think radically. When this guy ends up in counter magic against the black magic to save his daughter and eventually admit the power of god and his miraculous actions, the curtain falls.

So who lose? The radical thinking, Atheism, Science and Technology. All these loose to a half cut lemon and a bunch of green chillies and some weird sounding chantings.

'phoonk' has got all the ingredients of a typical 'desi bakthi' movie. An atheist protagonist, group of white sari clad theist women, evil men, evil women, holy men, holy women and as an Addition here, 'black magic' joins the party.There's one point in the movie where the kid who plays the younger sibling of the Kid who plays the lead role, asking his sister,

"why did the people scare when they saw lemon in the house ? whats in a lemon?"

and the innocent girl replies,

"what else 'Lime Juice! '"

and movie eventually proves that, there is something more than lime juice in a lemon.

Imagine how many growing brains will be polluted by this movie and contribute towards creating a idiotic new generation who believe in black magic, unusual powers of lemon and green chili?

Now; behind any crime, there have to be a motive and conspiracy.Here the motive is clear, RGV wanted some easy money with his pathetically gifted crew (Other than Sudip and couple of people who did the side roles, there were hardly any actor in the movie who could emote or behave easily. Expressions of the Female Villain played by Ashwini Kalsekar were not terrifying, as they were more like the behavior of a person in emergency, with no toilets in sight) and a school kid who scripts for him. I strongly doubt a conspiracy behind this too. who wants to promote black magic here in India other than the Saffron brigade and its holy warriors of Hindutva? Remember their hue and Cry about elevating Astrology to a post graduate Syllabus. Who ever it is, this is the curse of being an Indian. lets live this pain, and walk back as fast as possible until the true ‘Rama Rajya’ Comes.

Beatrix Potter- a Fairy Tale Lived

It was today's Google logo which guided me to Beatrix Potter. Potter was a pioneer among children’s story tellers and illustrators. A bit isolated but beautiful childhood of her was nothing shorter than a fascinating fairy tale. Animals, big farms, the mysteries of nature, even a pet bat (can u imagine?); no wonder she became a writer for children. It was sad to know that she was one of the early martyrs of gender discrimination which must have really affected her scientific career. She was blindly denied the membership of British Royal Society, though she was considered to be one of the best fungi experts among biologists.She had sketched hundreds of Fungi patterns by herself looking into the microscope and still had to end up as an amateur biologist only because she was born a woman. A natural environmentalist, who used a big part of her fortune to protect the country side where she spent most of her childhood in. After the tragic dismay of her fiancée, she focused on buying farms and lived in the astonishing beauty of nature, something most of us can only dream about.

This beautiful picture of a young 15 year old Potter caught my attention. One could feel the beauty of innocence in it.

The sketches of a nine year old Parker.

IOWA digital library has preserved most of her famous works in a beautiful digital flip-page form which worth a visit. Have a look at the screenshot and pay a visit to the site by clicking on the imaage.

The Metamorphosis

“One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug”. This is how the divine Kafka magic starts and I am finally home to my reading days. After discovering the new passion of self induced, nicotine powered solitude, it was a pleasure and quite an easy task to find myself back again to the beautiful world of books. Thanks to those self invited, long lasting spells of non momentary depression which I had acquired and learned to live with recently, ‘The Metamorphosis’ turned out to be a mesmerizing reading experience where I was literally lost in the carefully crafted magical realistic setup. I had to pinch myself to ensure that I still live in the blunted but still a safe, human form. It was my late teens where I first heard about Kafka but the first attempt to read ‘Metamorphosis’ was a miserable failure undoubtedly because of my poor understanding of Real life situations and transformations which an average middle class adult goes through. Magical realism was also something which was not digestible for me in those days where a growing brain of my atheistic teen was always keen on dismissing the supernatural things in an impatient and merciless way to become a perfect rationalist. After years of wasteful existence with out books, I have now finally read this in a kind of sprinting pace. But the regret for not reading this in its original language prevails as I have come to know that it has been lost in translation to a much distinguishable extent when it came to English from German.

“Kafka often made extensive use of a trait special to the German language allowing for long sentences that sometimes can span an entire page. Kafka's sentences then deliver an unexpected impact just before the full stop - that being the finalizing meaning and focus. This is achieved due to the construction of certain sentences in German which require that the verb be positioned at the end of the sentence. Such constructions cannot be duplicated in English, so it is up to the translator to provide the reader with the same effect found in the original text.One such instance of a Kafka translator's quandary is demonstrated in the first sentence of The Metamorphosis.(Wikipedia)”. Metamorphosis is considered to be the best talked about philosophical novella ever written especially on existentialism [Existentialism is a philosophical movement which posits that individuals create the meaning and essence of their lives, as opposed to it being created for them by deities or authorities or defined for them by philosophical or theological doctrines]. As per wiki, “The apparent hopelessness and absurdity that seem to permeate his works are considered emblematic of existentialism”.

In a layman’s angle I could see that, Kafka was literally demonstrating how a person who was the most instrumental being for his entire family and for the individual lives of its members, becomes a burden to them due to a completely unimaginable and miserable accident in his life for none of his faults. The tragic side of this reading experience is the realization of the very fact that each one of us is a ‘Gregor Samsa’ at least in one point of our life time and we will never know when we may transform our self into an ugly derogatory being which the closest people of our life would love to get rid off. The point is as clear as water. A ‘Gregor’ is a ‘Gregor’ as long as he wakes up at the dawn, catches the earliest train, works all the day like a machine, and hits back home with nickels in hand. In short, a Gregor is a Gregor only when he is a Gregor. When he (or for the same reason each one of us) ceases to be being ‘Gregor’, he has to be ready to get thrown off. Idea is quite simple. Every living thing in the world, (human being is not exceptional) struggle for an individual survival with in or out of the robust crust of their relational bonds which he or she is attached with. Gretta has a life to live and the same with Mr and Mrs Samsa. The importance of the lives of these three individuals cannot be belittled or ignored only because of some miserable thing which happens in the life of Gregor though he had been scarifying his own happiness for giving happiness to them.

Metamorphosis is an amazingly matured piece of literature works which one can go through once and live with the thought provoking reminiscences of it's reading experience there after.