Isaac Asimov: an Ode to the Grandmaster of Modern-Day Science Fiction

[NOTE: Wrote this appreciative piece on Asimov, in an Asimov-would-have-approved-if-alive style for a school assignment. It is the least esoteric and whimsical of my writings for obvious (and aforementioned) reasons. Also, it misses out on a lot of his other important works like the Bailey trilogy and End of Eternity. Just overlook and read on...]

"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right."

In an era when science fiction writing was confined to pathos-intended robot stories, antagonistic tales of rebelling humanoids and daunting visions of robot-invasions being penned by authors grappling with a genre in its infancy, Isaac Asimov truly stood apart with his assemblage of short stories and novels, written over an illustrious career spanning more than 50 years.

Many admirers describe Asimov’s vast body of work as highly instrumental  in chiseling out science fiction writing as a viable and exciting genre for daring authors, making him probably the only writer in the field to have achieved the same stature as HG Wells, who, for all practical reasons, ‘invented’ the genre itself. Just as Shakespeare contributed to English language by adding more than a thousand words to it, (‘advertising, ‘submerge’ and ‘outbreak’ to name a few), Asimov’s contribution to scientific vocabulary was coining the word ‘robotics’ and using it for the first time in his works. ‘Robotics’ as a scientific term continues to be a part of common parlance in our times.

Counting the feathers in an individual’s cap in not enough; I must take it on myself to explain why and how each and every last one of them landed in his cap. What is it that makes Asimov’s body of work so seminal in the light of contemporary times and advancements? What exactly makes him the Grandmaster of Science Fiction and no less?

Let me start by naming my favorite and most-read work of Asimov, of which I shall be talking the most in the following paragraphs: The Foundation Series. The Foundation saga comprises seven episodic novels telling the story of an adventurous odyssey of scientists on a mission to reduce the period of imminent ruination facing an Intergalactic Empire in a distant future, by following a path lighted by their ‘prescient’ mentor-scientist, Hari Seldon. The saga deals with a variety of themes and attempts to raise very fundamental questions pertaining to human emotion, action and limited human understanding of the universe through the medium of science fiction. What is truly remarkable of Asimov’s Foundation is that he takes enthralling science fiction storytelling devices (which make up for today’s staples in the genre) and effortlessly intertwines them with what we know as his sprawling, rip-roaringly individual ‘voice’: the light-hearted reflection of basic, unadulterated humanity found in the most unlikely of places.

With sharp wit and warm, seamless and simplistic use of language by his side, Asimov creates a peeping hole into the very heart of human consciousness, rightfully promulgating in his exemplary writings that there is hope in the bleakest, darkest corners of the world (correction, the universe!) as long as human will and wit remains intact. In many of his short episodic stories in the Foundation series, the seemingly inevitable perils that threaten to wipe out humanity from the universe are sidestepped and evaded by the unexpectedly simple use of uncommon common sense by one or more of the unlikely protagonists that Asimov created. After having read most of the short stories penned by him, I find them to be akin to detective conundrums, waiting to be cracked by the readers before the author spills the beans.

In fact Asimov did dabble briefly in detective fiction in his short-story series ‘Black Widowers’, wherein a group of laid-back armchair intellectuals invite a unique guest over for a homely dinner, and question them for any unexplained or out-of-the-ordinary event that might have taken place in their lives, usually resulting in the affirmative, going on to clear the air by eliminating implausible explanations by way of rigorous, logical in-arguments.

Another commendable truth about Asimov’s writings is his choice of characters that go on to be protagonist. In most of his works, especially the Foundation series, the archetypical ‘hero’ (or ‘heroine’) of the narrative is usually someone very resolute on a few binding principles and ideals, which he or she puts to practical use in the final phase of the story by acting on them when they seem the least likely to be upheld in the seriousness of the situation. For example, one of the initial central characters in the Foundation Saga, Salvor Hardin, (under whose name Asimov wrote the introductory quotation with which I began the article) abides by a handful of axioms that govern his actions, even though the reader is on the brink of believing that conforming to them would not yield any desirable outcome. In this fashion, Asimov loves to chalk out the boundaries for his characters’ field of play, and plays them out according to these guiding set of ‘sensibilities’, which I think would have been as much fun to him to write as they are for the readers to read.

It would be criminally unjust on my part if I leave out Asimov’s Robot stories out of the scope of the article, for ‘Robot-fiction’ is not just incomplete, but ill-formed without keeping in view the Grandmaster’s works on the topic. Asimov’s love for machines transcended more than hundreds of his short stories and novels, so much so that it is very surprising as to why there is minimal robotic action in the whole of Foundation series (except for Prelude to Foundation, which is a sort-of bridge to his earlier works on Robot-Human love-hate relationships). ‘I,Robot’, another of his pivotal short works on the genre essentially comprises stories of human interaction with experimental robots, and how robotics as a scientific discipline graduates from infancy to adulthood under the able watchfulness of the many brilliant scientists who act as protagonists of the narratives. While developing robots, Asimov employed the use of the celebrated (albeit fictitious) Three Laws of Robotics, which are as follows:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

The stories revolve around the minute logical fallacies ingrained in the apparently flawless Three Laws, and how scientific forerunners think of a way around the laws to wire the robots in a manner conducive to human society, and not otherwise. Again, it is to be underlined that the stories have a very basic logical and rational premise; almost in the same way as real-life scientist would approach real-life problems. It is in this realistic, minimalistic and clear writing that Asimov succeeds, and succeeds big time.

What truly distinguishes Isaac Asimov’s writings from those that came before, after or in his time is not in ‘how’ he wrote, but ‘what’ he wrote.  Most authors of yore such as Shakespeare, Dickens and Hawthorne have made their expressive writing their mainstay, their claim to fame. However, in Asimov’s case, it was his own belief that minimal ornamentation and embellishment is required in writing if the content is solid enough. My admiration for his writing springs from this very feature of them: high ideas are packaged in the neatest and simplest of words, minus the ostentation of big words and flowery expression. If not from his word, one may surely and safely conclude from his prolific works that there was much more than a little truth in what he meant when he said the following words:-

“I made up my mind long ago to follow one cardinal rule in all my writing—to be clear. I have given up all thought of writing poetically or symbolically or experimentally, or in any of the other modes that might (if I were good enough) get me a Pulitzer prize. I would write merely clearly and in this way establish a warm relationship between myself and my readers, and the professional critics—Well, they can do whatever they wish.”

Self, justified

I pray not to anyone, but myself,

I bow down to none, but my conscience.

I stand sans morals, outcast, abject

My hand at work, my brain at rest.

Debauch, I turn; to love, I forget

Mechanically to and fro, my limb vibrates

Organ I fondle, orgasm I seek,

Eyes half-closed; of malice, I reek.

The hour of love has long since passed,

The draught of pure emotion, flushed,

Still, my inertia-struck, addicted muscle,

Conforming to nothing, keeps up the jostle.

Still, I do what I do not without sanction,

What inner broodings be when pure is action?

Self-infliction, anyway, is but no crime,

Who, pray, except in thought, do I malign? 

Does clandestine thought add up to more

Than visible, palpable acts of offense?

Doesn’t outward goodness demand corruption

of innards and thoughts and mental abomination?

A question to all who shirk with deprecation,

Isn’t life all about dark, veiled obsessions?

Don’t all of us, inside our scaly shells,

Mask long-forgotten relics of our shady selves? 

The Answer Is Blowing in the Wind

Is it true that tragedy chisels the best out of the good? Why is it that an Anurag Kashyap and a Franz Kafka had to have peculiar and traumatizing childhoods, which irked them to come out as avant-garde artists? Is it only the wronged and fractured who is entitled to have greatness as an attribute?

What of that normal, average Joe who wants to come out of the mould of mediocrity he’s made to fit into without being beset and hounded by tragedy and gloom? What of that person whose biggest tragedy in life is hair growing out of his derriere and chest fat accumulating to give rise to a shameful bulge? Why cannot a person with excellent parentage, jovial childhood, normal adolescence and merry adulthood be entitled to artistry of the finest class? Is it because of the prosaic and mundane nature of routine, everyday life? Is it because the tragedy of great men is itself looked upon as their greatness? Is the normal, healthy, ideal upbringing so enforced and encouraged by all forms of media, governance, textbooks and the likes only but a myth, an unachievable, impalpable average?

Why is a normally brought-up, normally grown-up, aspiring artist looked down upon with sneers that, if words had been given to them, would blare at full volume questions on the lines of “How can you create a work of art if you haven’t seen the harshness and ‘reality’ of life for yourself?”

Under these circumstances, is our Tom, Dick and Harry unjustified in inflicting tragedy upon himself? Is this the very harshness of life he is so fervently and constantly reminded by the so-called connoisseurs of art? Isn’t it the perfect, glistening example of ‘Misery seeks company’? If tragedy is so vital in character building and imparting artistic tendency, is not suicide and murder justified for an artist, someone who hasn’t been inherently bestowed with tragedy, but imposes it upon himself? Isn’t it similar to talent versus practice, of which the former is intrinsic and in-born, and the latter is gained, acquired through practical repetition and infliction? Or does it only mean that without involuntary or inborn tragedy, true artistry can never be achieved? Or is this write-up just a study in irrelevance and baseless argument?

The painter is not the art. Never commit the folly of interchanging the art and the artist, which we so often do. We talk not of the art as much as we make inroads into studying the artist. To understand Kafka’s body of work, many an interpreter choose to study his childhood. Wrong! Let the artist be independent of criticism, let his art be put to scrutiny and not himself, except, of course, when the central figure of your scrutiny is him instead of his art. The why, how and ‘under what conditions..’ are merely result of the deep rooted human trait of investigating for meaning, searching for answers, without which the mind refuses to be at rest. All human action is, when viewed from a large-enough frame of reference, genetic, pre-programmed and predictably instinctive. The inquisitiveness to find meaning in randomness, godliness in cold natural selection, reassurance and order in chaos is a result of humanness, something that unifies the most artistic and the blandest parts of us. The questions, though, still remain.

Bob Dylan’s (titular) few words have all the answers. Smell them, feel them, and grasp them if you can. I cannot, and the result is this discharge. I feel purged already.

Social Responsibility of a Film-Maker

[NOTE: One from the archives. I wrote this on Friday the 12th of November, 2010. The slight evolution in my writing style is perceptible to me when I compare this huge article to those I have written more recently, more 'offhandedly'.] 

It is never an artist’s ambition to accommodate the expectations of his audience into his art form. The visual art of filmmaking is hardly any different. Commercial cinema, as it has been so branded today, is not only a sham, a façade, but also a very audacious and wounding ignominy to art forms in totality.
The first rule, as Tyler Durden oh-so famously bellowed, of Fight Club is that you do not talk about Fight Club. Extending this pop-culture referencing analogy to the topic of my (self proclaimed) rant, what I mean to say here is that real, lauded, hard-hitting cinema is never for its own sake. It has the power, the boldness, and the smugness to step up, be judge and provide solutions to the very problems it poses in its 120 minutes timeframe. It can never be utterly a disconnected world of its own; in its basic emotions such as greed, happiness, joy and envy, it is very much a social statement, because no artist can undo the constant sculpting of their thoughts at the hands of their circumstances and milieu, however badly they might try to.
Let’s take A Clockwork Orange for instance. It is a film laden with ideas, brimming and at times spilling over with passionate expression and honest brutality. A visual, mental and auditory ‘kick’. A running social commentary and darkly satirical undertones is what makes the film meaningful. It is not for art for the heck of it, or for the lately much-in-use (or more aptly, abuse) ‘entertainment’ value of it.
It is hence inherent that cinema carries the responsibility of shaping up the ideas of an entire generation, given that a proper, concerted solution is also provided as an epilogue, because a satire is incomplete without providing a way out of the situation it parodies. If otherwise, then it is a satire of itself, it parodies its own impotence and futility.
They say that a pen is mightier than the sword. I propose a rather contemporary overhaul to this age-old adage. The camera has replaced the pen, and the sword is well, anything that helps impose one’s beliefs over another, be it an AK-47, be it a nuclear weapon, or be it hard cash.
We live in times dubbed as the ‘ghor kalyug’, translated to English as the clichéd ‘bad times’. In any given era we look back into, we’ve always have had that one, looming, impending danger ahead of us that hangs like the sword of Damocles overhead, a danger to humanity as a whole. In the middle 20th century, it was the fear of human race being wiped out at the hands of a third, final world-war, with big-wiggies like USA and Russia threatening to tear each other to shreds with their mammoth arsenal of nuclear warheads. As the USSR disintegrated into a dozen countries, and North Korea grew weak economically, this once-pounding fear went dormant, and is now almost unheard of. It has been, however, duly replaced by the next big impending peril, what we term as ‘global warming’.
And so, every period of humanity has its own idiosyncrasies, its own icing-on-the-cake, its own perception of lifestyle and its own whitewashed sense of sensibilities. This, in part, gets reflected in our cinema. At the time when the USA-Russia cold war was underway, we saw a dramatic shift of our cinema to subjects like espionage, double-crossing spies, and undercover secret agents, what with Ethan Hunt and James Bond leading the pack. So, in a way, a majority of movies cash in on the fear housed inside the audience’s hearts, and also inside the filmmaker’s own.
But then, there is another crop of movies, a la Fight Club, Memento, Dark City, and The Matrix that expend their own ideas rather than borrowing it from actual events. Of course, they can never be completely disconnected to our world; in fact they are more in sync with our lives’ pertinent issues than outlandish, society-borrowing films. Therefore, in order to being about a change in the society, in the social skeleton, it is a duty of the film maker to mould a film that not only is a result of its environment, but also very much a solution in itself. A problem left unsolved is merely stating the obvious, it is hence said that cinema is not just a reflection; it is how-to guide to self improvement.
It is also questionable as to what intelligence level the filmmaker holds. In times when a Hi-definition camcorder is as ubiquitous as a cell phone, any idiot armed with this device can go one making their own movies. This is exponentially dangerous when these self proclaimed flag bearers of intelligent cinema pass them off as ‘art’ films. Art cinema certainly is the ideal playfield for these pseudo-filmmakers to try and mould the minds of people they cater to. A few close-ups here, a few serious shots there, and lo, you have your average artsy film that the critics love and the audience love to hate. Hence, a film being an art film alone can never be a cent percent assurance of it being socially relevant and essential.
The audience should be as good as non-existent for a filmmaker when he’s shooting a movie. For it to be hard hitting and powerful, a film has to be no-holds-barred and relentless, without as much of a hint of cringing and whining at sensitive issues or controversial topics. Filmmaking (excellent filmmaking, that is) is always and always has been, very much a personal project, never with the accommodation of how the audience will react to it. One of the most glimmering examples to this claim is the entire career of auteur Guru Dutt, who made timeless, impeccable and not to forget, very personal films.
Many people opine that moviemaking has its own limitations when juxtaposed against book reading, which is, the pen has no precincts, no confining boundaries of the physical world. Whereas, the camera does have these confines, it is captive to the three dimensional world, with the damned Laws of Physics limiting its freedom. In today’s times, however, this once-seemingly unassailable advantage that writing a book had over making a film has, to an extent, been overcome. With cutting edge technology and a gazillion dollars at your disposal, making a movie is no longer bound to a camera shooting images. It is a computer producing these images, choreographing spectacular, out-of-the-world (literally, in some cases) scenarios and scenes. The boundaries in filmmaking have receded back in fear; the daunting fear of technology and the sinew resolution of man’s wild creativity. Truly, filmmaking has stood the test of time, and has not allowed time to bind it down just to a camera shooting movies. It has evolved from a solely optical viewing to a whole experience, a treat to all the senses, what with 3D and even 4D (as they call it) movies being made.
Also, films have a direct connect to a large bracket of audience, be it rich or poor (I myself once saw a film in a multiplex and paid in all, Rs. 30), old or young, even literate or illiterate. It thus has more power than any other medium to bring about the done to death ‘change’ we have been talking about. A film that is permanent, timeless in its portrayal, goes down into the pages of history and inspires not only one generation, but multitudes of generations to come, and I exemplify this with Charlie Chaplin’s magnum opus ‘The Great Dictator’, which released over half-a-century ago, but refuses to wither out of film lovers’ memories, standing rock-strong of the fact that one man had the guts to parody a dictator who had the whole of Europe gasping and running amok with sheer fear. And there are multiple examples to back this idea of mine, the most recent being Fahrenheit 9/11, a resounding slap at the George Bush regime and its outlook towards the War in Afghanistan.
We have arrived at a time when creativity can never touch the limitations of cinema. If you can dream it, you can film it. Therefore, in order to make a social impact, we must keep a level head and make movies with a certain responsibility, in fact as a repayment of people’s trust in you that has made you competent enough to film it in the first place. Of course, the most easily affected audience is the teenage bracket, which gets swayed by the apparent ‘coolness’ with which the actors smoke cigarette after cigarette on-screen, or how intoxicatingly beautiful does the intake of drugs look in films like Trainspotting or Requiem For A Dream. Of course, to a sensible, mature audience, these activities are see-through and they can actually read between the lines to get the real message of the film, but it the adolescent, young-adults who have this ardent desire to look cool at all times, and movies being so easily stylised, they get wooed into ill habits very easily.
But then again, this is an impediment of the audience and not the filmmaker. This is just the dormant monstrosity of our young adults, which begs to come out, and eventually does come out under the sheath of movies and cinema. It is only the fickle minded that get infatuated by every bad thing that is put to exhibition in the movies, hence the blame is not as much of the moviemaker as it is of the audience.
To conclude my ramble, I would say that films and filmmakers have quite much of a responsibility, and the first and foremost of them is, making movies to the best of their intelligence. To cheat your own self and lowering the level of intelligence (or even elevating it beyond your level of intelligence) of your films is, by my books, the biggest ‘artistic’ crime that can ever be committed. Cinema that is pretentious is the most hateable of all insults to filmmaking. Even if a film is bad, callously terrible in its execution, but completely honest in its level of interpretation of the subject, it is infinitely better than a film that is very well made but dishonest and showy.
In the end, I would like to quote the poet Vladimir Mayakovski, whose poems were as tragic as the story of his life:
 “Art is not a mirror to reflect the world, but a hammer with which to shape it.”

Of sexual pleasure, emancipation and God

In orgasm lies a bizarre epiphany, a realization of the burlesque of emotions that we ostentatiously want to exhibit and be offended at the lack of from others. In the split second of having an ejaculation, one can clearly see how his or her emotions are merely skin-deep and paper thin, while at the core of the human bosom lies unadulterated nothingness: an unexpected apathy and lack of inward sensitivity towards anyone but its own self. It is in the succeeding moments of the ultimate activity of pleasure that we can see how superficial our motivations and self-justifications have been. It is akin to the moment of weightlessness and void one experiences on bungee-jumping from atop a sky-scraping cliff, where the immensely downcast feeling of void immediately follows that of paramount pleasure, only to be replaced the next second by the latter. I believe it is this split-second void of worldly emotions and awareness of one's own shallowness of idealistic rationale and moral uprightness that people refer to as 'Godliness'.

Matrimony: A Blind Acceptance of Antiquity

[Foreword: this marks my return to sermonizing by means of an article. I request you not to drop dead of boredom while you're reading this. All the best, and may you reach the bottom!]

 “Whatever was to be said has been said. It is only in expression and eloquence that writing evolves, not in fabric.”

Man has been one to forge relationships and bondages for itself since time immemorial, which is why it is not very much off the bull’s eye to call it a social being: a product of nature incapable of sustenance without community and group dwelling.

Even when in one of our initial psychology lessons the heading ‘Psychology As A Social Science’ came up, our teacher started off by establishing  and taking for granted that human existence is impossible in isolation; that the whole purpose of humanity is to collaborate and then go on to observe other duties. Bombarded with such univocal ideas, I set out to ponder on the lines of ‘Why is a social obligation, say matrimony, a social obligation?’ Why is it that at every level, as humans we are expected to take part in social ties and bind ourselves down in accordance with a set of ancient rules laid down by wizened old men in their time of leisure?

Has ‘societal evolution’ hit a proverbial full stop in this sense, and any effort to expose this fallacy is looked down with a wince and a clicking of the tongue, all in the name of demolition of our age-old culture and old school of thought? Why is it that religion is so influential a force in our times that it assumes the role of social restriction and clouds the way we would otherwise have behaved and functioned socially? Why is there a Paigambar Mohammed, Confucius, or Mahabharat to remind me how to live my life in a social setup? Why can I not be a believer unless I have to accept a certain ‘way of life’ that defines my actions and dominates my thinking? Why does an institution such as matrimony exist, wherein one has to have legal and social sanction in order to raise a legitimate offspring? I am afraid my questions will remain unanswered as long as they are, well, unanswered.

Many a men (and women, before you jump the gun to label me male-chauvinistic) have been attackingly vocal in their notion that marriage is a pointless and character-diminishing social commitment, which the sooner is done away with, the better will it be for all of humanity.  Franz Kafka, one of the founding avant-garde writers of 20^th Century, has famously and in my view, very rightly said, “I must be alone a great deal. What I accomplished was only the result of being alone.”

 I can quote many others in this regard who further my and Kafka’s point, but I will not delve into their wise words for the retention of my own way of expression, something I have touched upon in the opening quotation.

Matrimony is considered an institution of deep reverence and fidelity, something that to me is a red herring in the masquerade of which people fornicate, or, in keeping with the parlance of our times, fuck the individual of their choice and legitimize it in the eye of the society and its constituting persons by calling it a pact. What is even more disarming is how matrimony in its status quo continues to be an open, socially boisterous and publicly exhorting event. Of course, it is but a choice of the one being hitched to decide whether the event has to be public or not, but for me, marriage remains a queer notion that I am yet to come to terms with (if that is what you call adolescence, I am your perfect specimen).

Individuality is a trait that is (in a flipside to community living) inextinguishably basic and primeval in humans (I am afraid my very limited biological knowledge will not let me safely extend this assumption to all living beings). Wherever there breeds man, breeds in it the urge to be free, unrestrained in thought and action, elusive of any contact with another human: in short, individuality. While fifth grade moral science taught all of us that an extreme of any and everything is undesirable, sometimes this bottled, pent-up, dormant individuality spurts out in one-off cases.

One worthy example of my claim would be Christopher McCandless, famously known under his self-conferred pseudonym Alex Supertramp, who gave up a financially and socially secure life to run off (literally) and live in the company of nothing except the greens, all in a desperate search of himself. Even though he met a tragic end in the hinterlands of Alaska due to acute starvation, his gleaming beacon-of-an-example provide us with profound insight into the dormant and blazingly individual nature of man, raring and restless to come to the hilt, bustling to be expressed and lived with. To douse this streak of the inherent human emotion would be akin to an assault on the very substance of the human soul, akin to asphyxiating to death a full-fledged personificated individual that is individuality. Matrimony does exactly this.

In what I see as a very patriarchal social set-up, marriage is another nail in the coffin for all proponents of individualism in humans in general and the women in particular. In the Indian society, it is an accepted norm that the representative of the fairer sex in matrimony is subject to numerous negatives as opposed to what I will call the ‘unfairer’ sex. However noble and well intentioned may have been the initial ideas behind their inception, the marital code we have given to ourselves has been interpreted grotesquely and ignobly in ways more than one of late. My explaining the ills of dowry, property inheritance laws (post-marriage) and the general sense of entitlement that the family of the groom expects to have over the bride will be entirely futile, for they are widely and ubiquitously known. Also, in my convoluted view, to have even a fraction of feeling of prerogative over another individual requires the complete willingness of the individual over which this liberty is being shrouded. It is in entirety the choice of the bride to not be a bride and never have an eye raised over her raising a child with someone who is not what society would call her husband; the same stands true for a male, in case you take me for a feminist and not a humanist.

It enrages me to see a man or woman being called promiscuous and characterless if they have been in and out of relationships like one would switch between morning and evening attires. Of course, I am not one to support what we call ‘double timing’, for that would be clubbed under cheating and treachery in general, something I try not to indulge in myself and despise to any given extent. However, when it comes to being in a live-in relationship, the society tends to label those in it to be commitment-phobic and emotionally incapable of maintaining a happy and fulfilling association, something that I again disregard and sideline as social bullshit. Forging ties and cutting them off is an inalienable right of man, it is not anyone else’s business to monitor and police a couple’s intermingling and look down to their relationship merely because they choose not to give it social sanction by calling it marriage. I am dead against the notion that a healthy marriage is reflective of the mental stability and normalcy of its constituents.

All said and done, I must make the confession that I do not have a plausible hypothetical set-up of the society that would alternate the one we have today. The idea of a family itself would not have been cradled and given shape, were it not for the institution I so strongly rally against in this write-up. I propose nothing in place of the nuclear family skeleton that we base our life on. I might not have all the answers but I do get the satiation one gets on asking pertinent questions and raising sustainable doubts over the way things exist today. I am but a fragment of the time I live in, no more no less, but still willing to be time-independent and society-independent in terms of ideology and existence. Alas, there are none (in general knowledge, anyway) who have escaped their affixed places in time and space physically, but to be an escapee in thought and mental awareness is the trait of the great. The condescending eye within me that longs for this escape and enlightenment sees (or at least pretends to see) matrimony as a damnable social evil, something which I do not have the answer to, but over which I can raise many a doubt and question.

“All the world's a stage, And all men and women merely players: They have their exits and their entrances…”

-William Shakespeare

How i interpret Inception

[Originally published and hosted at http://passionforcinema.com/.]

Christopher Nolan has been (since his initial college short-film Doodlebug), apart from all other things that he has been, a talented film maker endowed with the mastery to produce art which is open to endless interpretations and discussions. It has been his track record to amaze and at many places, outwit his audience with twist endings, blink-and-you-miss-it direction, and the consistency that even someone as great as Steven Spielberg cannot offer. His work is not comparable to what stuff like Michael Gondry and Charlie Kaufman produce, but more likely to, say, Stanley Kubrick’s body of work.
What comes as a latest (and disputably, the best) addition to this list is the Leonardo Dicaprio-starrer ‘Inception’. Within the opening minutes of the film, you can see the signature ‘Nolan’ style taking over: grand location, a hard-to-follow story, and a staggeringly original plot. Cutting without a moment’s delay to the chase, let me reach the central motive of my writing this piece.
Many film pundits have presented utterly outlandish explanations of the movie, which to the best of my knowledge, are merely results of over analysis. What I got out of the movie was not technical plot details and crooked metaphors, instead the basic, emotional message that the filmmaker has tried to voice. It is, at many places, a taunt to the smart-alecs who believe it is their responsibility to act as a mouthpiece for the whole human race. What I present in the following paragraphs is not a definitive, quintessential guide to unlocking the genius of Inception; it is not the final word. It is just a straightforward, personal explanation of what I gather out of the film’s proceedings. In an age where the critic is more ubiquitous than the audience, what I want to write is a non-critical, rather appreciative perspective of the film.

Nolan has always been fond of setting up and establishing an environment with his own set of rules in the two-and-a-half hours of the movie. Be it the bleak, sleety, chilly landscape of Alaska where the sun never sets in Insomnia, or be it the dark, brooding city of Gotham with lawlessness and corruption at an unending fist-fight with the heroic vigilantism of the ‘Masked Crusader’ in Batman Begins and Dark Knight, Nolan loves to set up boundaries and challenges for himself as a filmmaker. And so it is with Inception; you have an entirely imagined world of dreams and artificiality, what with its own sets of defining laws and precincts, limiting factors and demarcated boundaries of play. Nolan is a very angular artist, one who, instead of focusing more on the emotional and flawed aspects of humanity, wants to have rational and rule-bound storytelling, something at once unequivocal and yet open to several interpretations.
Whenever we think of dreams, what comes to our mind are vague recollections of vivid imagery, half-remembered and half-forgotten, but never as well-formed and constructed and detailed as portrayed in the film in reckoning. To see it in a structured, skeletal form is tad incredible, and this is where many critics believe Inception has failed: in its very basic assumption of seeing dreams as a taut, technical, rule-based dimension.
But then, my point is, to the kind of crafty, shrewd and thoroughly professional characters portrayed in the movie, whose very bread thrives on the interception and manipulation of dreams and dreamers, it cannot be afforded that dreams be set up without any rules. These men and women are trained, practiced fabricators and architects of dreams; they have set up these laws because without them, their very profession is at risk of being thwarted by a vague but powerful counter-thought. There is no margin for any kind of ambiguity in the kind of occupation they are engaged in, they need to have a preset network of defining conditions in their dream space. It can be compared to a bunch of real-life conmen who plan their con to the last detail, but the moment they get on with it, earth loses its gravity and they start floating in the air like balloons, all plans of a con thwarted. Hence, the dreams we dream are very different from the chiseled, mechanical dreams of the architects in Inception, and hence we cannot complain Nolan of portraying dreams unrealistically (pun intended).
Coming to my last point, I found the ambiguity of the climactic sequence the USP of the film: the overcooked, feel-good track, the inspirational music (which is perhaps the best song in the soundtrack, ‘Time’) overlaying the perfect-frame close up of Leonardo Dicaprio as he regains consciousness in slow motion, the equivocal stance of the immigration agent, and finally the wobbly top, all make for the ideal finish. Where many interpreters (movie-coroners, I call them) believe that this overly-jovial final track is indicative of and furthers the idea that the movie is still being played out in a dream, I neither agree nor disagree on that point.

Time by Hans Zimmer

On Wikipedia, Nolan is quoted saying that Cobb walking away from the top, indifferent of it collapsing or continuing its spin is the main thing, and not its actual fall or prolonged rotation. I believe the same so too; even if the top did keep spinning, it is of little consequence for Cobb. It is just like he’s given up on what’s illusion and what’s real, because what he has today is something he had always wished for (that is, his being united with his family), so it doesn’t really make a difference even if he were in a dream. It could be that he is dreaming all this up like the attic-full of old men Yousef takes him too, but Cobb is ignorant of everything, and still is very much in bliss.
In a way, Cobb no longer cares. And through this little trick, Nolan wants to tell us audience to give the analysis a rest and let the film be a film for its sake. He slips in this feathery rap-on-the-back-of-the-head for those very smart-alecs I talked of in the beginning, as if snubbing them off saying, ‘even Cobb’s happy with it being/not being a dream, why’re you guys so damn prying?’
Then again, it’s just my opinion. All said and done, Inception is Christopher Nolan’s stand-out masterpiece, one which had been long overdue after the flawless Memento. I salute and immensely revere this auteur of a film-maker who keeps a level head and churns out one great film after another, each better than the last.

निशाचर

[I don't want much of a foreword for this, its just an impulsive piece without any pre-planning whatsoever. Just the night and me and a pen and a paper.]

काली इस रात की कालिख जैसा, 

धुंआ उड़ाता जाता हूँ|

या है ये किसी आईने जैसा, 

खुद में ही जो मैं झांकता हूँ||

ये निशा का जादू सर चढ़ता, 

मैं झूम-झूम आवारा हूँ|

जो सुबह सुनहरा सपना था,

इस अंधियारे में समा गया||

हूँ मैं, बस मैं, सब बिछड़ गए, 

सारा जग-जग है सोया|

सब छोड़-छाड़, विधियाँ-विधान, 

मैं आशिक अंधियारे का||

ना मधुशाला, ना प्रेम किया,

है नहीं कोई अब साथी|

इकलौता मैं, इकलौता पथ, 

दोनों की मंजिल अनजानी||

टिकती यहाँ है दुनियादारी,

है लगन यहाँ एक बीमारी|

जो एक बार दिल की करे, 

बन जाता है वो भिखारी||

इस रात में, बस अंधाधुंध, 

कुछ खुद से ही गुनगुनाता हूँ|

दुनिया चले या दुनिया थमे,

बस धुंआ उड़ाता जाता हूँ...

The Short Existence of Time Travel

[My first sci-fi short, and probably not my last, there's more science fiction coming from my pen. Maybe its too short, maybe its too wannabe-ish, but an artist can only create their type of art. Art which is for the public is not art, its a business commodity. Enough said already...]

The scientist gaped at his close-ended creation, what he preferred calling the magnum opus of life. What the gravitation laws had been for Newton and what the light bulb had been for Edison, the scientist wanted the time machine to be for him. All the toil and sweat and blood that he had spilt in his six year-long study had finally taken material shape.

It was tough to describe the oddly angular compartment-of-a-contraption, the brain-child of one of the most gifted minds of the world. It had intermittent pieces of metal roughly conjoined to it, giving it the appearance of a giant scaly fish with a circular base to keep it standing erect. And then there was a doorway (partly for the dramatics), that made that romantic, creaky sound reminiscent of ancient wooden doors featured in every other yellowing novel from good old times. 

All that there was left to do was to connect the machine to the power outlet. The scientist knew how all his research in particle physics and molecular electronics had come down to this very moment, as if all that had happened in his life till now was meant for the conception of this gadget.

He picked up the fat, black wire that plugged to the power outlet. The comforting, sonorous click of the plug sliding into the grooves of the outlet soothed him somewhat. He switched on the machine with the eagerness of an infant playing with his brand new toy, and it whirred to life, complying with its creator’s wish.

And at this very moment of unthinkable joy and mad furore, the creaky door opened with the promptness of a bullet, emitting a short, loud squeak of the door unhinging. Out descended a man, as if appearing out of thin air, with obscenely long and untidy hair on his head, face and chest, and being almost as tall as the scientist.  Before the scientist could have comprehended and registered this sudden arrival, the man from time unknown brandished a futuristic revolver from the depths of his coat, and punctured the scientist’s temple with a neat, direct bullet shot. Before the scientist could fall to the ground, the man turned his weapon towards the contraption he had only just alighted from, and emptied the revolver at the mainframe of the machine, each bullet choking the life out of it. Just as he was doing so, another human form had started appearing inside the machine, but before it could take complete shape, the machine had fizzed and cracked, dying an instant death.

The scientist, the man from time unknown, the revolver, and the incomplete human figure fell to the ground at the same moment, the gun with a clank and the bodies with a subdued thud. Time travel was no longer heard of in human history.

END.