WALL-E

What do you call an animated movie which is part science-fiction, part musical, part comedy, and part drama? You call it WALL-E! I have always been a fan of animated features but WALL-E is the best I have seen since Finding Nemo and it is little surprise that the two movies have the same parents. The Pixar team have taken the common Hollywood theme of the end of the earth and turned it into a visual symphony of such humor and depth of emotions that one cannot help but be enchanted by it.

WALL-E is an acronym for Waste Allocation Load Lifter- Earth Class. Long after earth has become uninhabitable due to the large amount of waste created by a particular corporation BnL or Buy and Large, WALL-E has been assigned the job of cleaning up the mess. He does it with due diligence, locating and compacting the waste but in the process he also collects remnants of the bygone era. And his shed is a collection of assorted treasures like Zippo lighters, teddy bears, a Rubik’s cube and WALL-E’s most prized possession, a VHS tape of an old Hollywood musical, to which he tries to dance every night, after a long day’s work. This act is quite difficult for him as he himself is nothing more than a metallic box with nuts and bolts with legs like an army tank’s wheels! This all too human machine longs for companionship and his binocular-like eyes get all dopey whenever the romantic number in the musical plays and the man and the woman on the screen hold hands. WALL-E’s expression as he watches this is priceless and heart-warming.

The rest of the movie is about his finding a companion, in the form of a highly sophisticated, extra-terrestrial robot, EVE (another acronym) and the ensuing adventure. The first thirty minutes of the movie is devoid any dialogs. It is a collection of visuals and sounds that convey the emptiness of earth and WALL-E’s loneliness with perfection. The magic of animation meets basic human emotions to create a movie of such honesty and warmth that is sure to touch even the most cynical of moviegoer.

For an animation movie, WALL-E deals with several adult themes like consumerism and environmental catastrophe. The movie is a gentle, prophetic reminder that the present human society based on consumer capitalism is unsustainable in the long run.

Watch it!

Calcutta Farewell

It’s funny how in talk one thing leads to another and before you know it, you’re hit by a heavy dose of nostalgia and you can’t stop recounting some significant piece of your past. Let me explain. The other day R and I were planning this fanciful vacation to Jamaica. We do this often: plan getaways to exciting, exotic locations, the best deals, the cheap hideouts, only to realize pretty quickly that we neither have the time, or more importantly, the money to make such a journey and we relegate the plan to the future, make mental notes, indulge in some hope that someday we will make it there. Such a place happened to be Jamaica a few days back, and talking about Jamaica, I was reminded of Harry Belafonte’s Jamaica Farewell and it turned out that that song was a favorite number from both our childhoods. For me, my father used to sing that song often when he was in one of his moods when Pat Boone, Jim Reeves, Nat King Cole, Belafonte songs, among many others would be sung one after another on a load-shedding induced dark, quiet evening. For R, that song was a constant feature in his school’s music class and hence has fond memories for him. This got me all excited and I quickly googled the song and I found an old black and white video of it on YouTube. It gave me immense joy to listen to it. And as one is prone to do on YouTube, browsing the related videos, I ended up listening to several versions of the Jamaica Farewell and the Banana Boat song and relived a little piece of my childhood.

It happens to me a lot these days. I don’t know if it’s a symptom of my advancing years or the fact that I have too much time on my hands right now, I seem to be getting more and more nostalgic as years go by. Nostalgic about my childhood, my years in college, the years after that. The smells, the sounds of Calcutta, the city of growing up often feature on these nostalgia jaunts. Like the other day I was reading this article in the Telegraph about some overflowing garbage vat on S.N. Banerjee Road and there was a line mentioning that this vat is near Hind cinema, which is now closed. My first reaction on reading that was how come no one told me about this. What next, they close down Lighthouse cinema too? Oh wait, they already did that! There’s a stupid shopping complex it its place now. It’s not like I watched every movie that played at Hind when I was in Calcutta. To the contrary, it was quite a rundown place as I remembered it that often showed dirty morning show movies. But it was close to my school, a landmark in the place I went to nearly 10 years of my life. It’s this piece of my childhood that I have some claim over, so what if the only film I can recall watching there is Darr in the early 90s, when I was a closet Shah Rukh admirer!

And not just Hind cinema. The places I frequented growing up in Calcutta have changed. Some have been renovated till they’re unrecognizable (like Flurry’s) or they have just been taken over by a chain restaurant or a bigger name brand or have simply shut down. It’s not that I dislike the shopping malls. I love City Center and the cheaper Big Bazaar near home but why do they have to come up in place of my Hinds and Lighthouses? Why does Ganguram on Chowringhee have to shut down and BCL move to another location? Why does the Calcutta I know have to disappear completely and become this whole other city I can’t recognize?

Or is it just that I have been away too long?

Think about this: you are dead and stuck in a place between heaven and earth. For you to be able to reach heaven, you need to choose one significant memory from your life on earth. Just one. This memory is your heaven and you will be stuck with this memory for all eternity. This is the theme of the Japanese movie “After Life” I watched yesterday. Dead souls are brought to this facility which looks very much like an old government building or an old university and they have three days to tell the staff at this facility what this single special memory is. The staff then recreate this memory on film (!) and when the dead watch this film they can move to heaven or someplace out of the limbo, at least. There are all kinds of memories ranging from the feeling of being in a mother’s lap to flying a Cessna over fluffy, white clouds. There are some who find it very hard to pinpoint any one memory. They’ve either had a very ordinary, mundane life or one so fulfilling that they cannot do justice to it by choosing any single memory. And there’s one character, a young boy of 21, who refuses to choose, saying he takes responsibility of his whole life and cannot choose one special memory to keep with him. Interestingly, those who fail to choose, end up working in the facility as they cannot move to heaven.

Though my synopsis sounds heavy, the movie is quite a light-hearted treatment of the subject. It’s about life and its little joys and moments of happiness and sadness. It’s funny in parts like when this middle-aged Japanese man reminisces about his triumphs with women, mostly prostitutes, and discusses at length how lovely and fulfilling his sexual experiences have been but when it comes the time to choose, he chooses the memory of his daughter’s wedding! Or an old, senile spinster with a mind of a nine-year old who only collects different leaves and flowers from the compound of the facility and brings them to the staff and cannot, for the life of her, recollect anything memorable, anything significant. The staff member finally zeroes in on her fascination for cherry blossoms and that’s the memory she leaves with.

Do watch the movie when you get a chance and think about what single memory of your entire life would you choose, if you had to!

Yet another sunset picture

Here's another sunset photograph. Since I can never get up in time for capturing a sunrise, a sunset is a healthy, equally beautiful alternative. This one's taken on a road trip between Baltimore and Amherst. I'm sorry but I forgot the name of this bridge. I took this photograph from inside a moving vehicle at 60 miles per hour!

July 2, 2008 11.06 p.m., Baltimore

What if life was a fairy tale? With magic books and human changing into birds. With beautiful princesses and kings and magic ointments that cure every wound. Where things are in black and white and good and evil are clearly demarcated. Where you always know what is the right thing to do and there are not many moments of doubt. But life has to be this collection of moments when most things are not clear, there’s no right and wrong and it’s just choices, some good ones which you can stand by and some that you kick your feet later for having made.

It’s also this endless cycle, a routine of activities to earn a living: though when I see the people around me I can’t call what they do as living. They do things to pass the time and are quite delusional to think what they do is of any significance to anyone, including themselves. They have careers, families, hobbies, aspirations, the works or they think they do. It’s perhaps more important to think certain things exist when they really do not. In other words, delusion is real. It’s like the monsters in the shadows: if you think they exist (which I did), they sure do.

I’m reading a book of Italian Folktales, select and retold by Italo Calvino. I love reading Calvino’s work for the sheer beauty of his language, even though I’ve only read them as translations, so I wonder how moving the original Italian may be. So when I was in Amherst’s Jones library and I saw this book on the catalog, I promptly checked it out. The book contains an introduction by the author describing why he chose to do the book and in it he goes on to declare that folktales are real. In his opinion they offer a general explanation of life “preserved in the slow ripening of rustic consciousness”; folktales are catalogs of the potential destinies of men and women. It’s true that folktales are more often than not just allegories for real life and life’s challenges and triumphs but the simplicity of the tale is so far removed from real life that it is hard to apply the folktale formula to it, at times. Or maybe life really is actually simple and we just complicate it needlessly, to make it worthwhile maybe. There are way to many “maybe”s in the previous sentence.

Whether or not folktales are about life and human vicissitudes, I immensely enjoy escaping into a world of fantasy and magic where things are shinier, brighter, and as Calvino says “where paths bristling with obstacles lead to a happiness held captive by dragons.”

My obsession with sunset continues. This picture was taken in Goa recently. I'm not sure why I take so many pictures of the setting sun. Maybe just because it's a ready subject for a photograph or because I am truly fascinated by the beauty of the setting sun. Who knows...

When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.

When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.

When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.

When they came for the Jews,
I did not speak out;
I was not a Jew.

When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.

martin niemoller