An incredible experience

“Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second.”

These were the words of legendary French director Jean Luc Goddard and in my opinion, he couldn’t have been truer. (One might argue the quotation is invalid in today’s scenario when improvement in technology has increased the frame rate. But that’s a pretty humorous take on the saying, if you ask me.) Anyway, I’m talking about what an incredible experience I have had with the movies and how the passion for movies have left an undying impact in my life.

I did watch movies during the childhood on Saturdays on Nepal Television and later when the cables came in, on various foreign channels too. But I don’t have much to remember about them. During the early days of my movie watch, “Lord of the Rings” trilogy is probably the one I think I can vividly remember. Lagaan, Empires of the Sun, Black, Honey I Shrunk the Kids were probably the others which I remember as having watched and liked and to some extent knowing what happened in them, during my childhood. The love for movies became profound when I was in the ninth grade. The first movie that I can consider as having liked to a great extent and having kick started my journey with movies was Forrest Gump. Some might consider the movie as too much dramatic and rather implausible one. But the unforgettable character of Forrest, its portrayal of life as “a feather in the wind”, as well as infinite joy it carried had a lasting effect of movie on me. Around that time, the favorite movies I watched were Cast Away, Appocalypto, No Country for Old Men, Toy Soldiers, 300, The Simpsons movies and others.

This movie watching activity became less intense when I entered the tenth grade, owing to the colossal force called SLC. But it revived as soon as I came over it. And how wonderful days those were. I still remember the fun, the joy and the happiness of those days. Before I started high school education, I spent a whole lot of time watching movies. I watched several movies during that period which I admired a lot that time and still do today such as Slumdog Millionaire, Malena, Basic Instinct, A History of Violence, The Lives of Others, Scarface, Godfather I and II and X-Men Origins: Wolverine. The journey with movies took a new step in the eleventh grade when I became obsessed with watching movies that were listed at the top of rankings by AFI, IMDB, Time and other such means. Some of them I liked and some I didn’t but still the experience was really fulfilling one. The favorite ones from that period are A Beautiful Mind, Once Upon a Time in the West, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Braveheart, The Great Gatsby, Kramer vs Kramer and others. Later I watched with great joy foreign language films such as The Bicycle Thief, Children of Heaven, Seven Samurai, Rashomon and Tokyo Story. Moving beyond the boundary of Hollywood, Bollywood and in some way Kollywood too was a very enriching experience. Later I also watched the art movies of Bergman, Fellini and others like The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, 8 ½, The Virgin Spring. To be honest, I haven’t fathomed all of these movies but the ones which I have, I think they have given me a new experience.

From Forrest Gump to The Seventh Seal and from Peter Jackson to Federico Fellini, the intimate bond with movies has brought me great joy and bliss in life. I don’t consider myself extremely prolific viewer of movies but I have had a fair share of them. I still haven’t watched many which I had planned to watch years ago. But the ones I’ve watched, I think they have made my life thriving in many ways. With movies, I have been to the magical world of Lord of the Rings and to the one close to where I live in Loot. I have shared the feelings of the juror from Twelve Angry Men and a blind and mute but in many other ways remarkable girl from Black. Knowing so much differing characters and being to places so varying, which is quite unimaginable in my real life, has shaped the way I live and altered the observation through which I look at life. Although the journey has a long way to go, the path it has travelled up to this point in my life has, in many ways, been an incredible one.

Realization

Oh man,

When I behold you,

I see someone in your eyes

It’s not you or your soul that I see

What I see is greatness

What I sense is power

And What I believe

It’s pure and divine quality

When I realized one day

It was nothing but myself

On five pointers

Hari, Ryan and Alok were the three folks at IIT and as the narrator of the story Hari suggests, probably the last people on earth one would have to ask about getting into IIT. They were the three five pointers from IIT and as such, the under performers at IIT, the one people call as the best college in India and are ready to give up everything just to get into it. And “Five Point Someone” by Chetan Bhagat, is just the story of these three people, which I finished reading very recently and well, what an experience it turned out to be! I might have identified with the book to like it, being a B.E. student just like them and with pretty much the same woes as them. Anyway, I did like the book.

Previously, I had read two of the Chetan Bhagat novels Three Mistakes of my Life and One Night @ The Call Centre. They were really interesting and pretty attention-grabbing. The themes they revolved around, the theme of a person trying to meet his dreams and the circumstances challenging him in his trails in the first one and that of people being worn out by a particular environment they live in and needing a way out of it to live at the fullest in later ones, too were impelling. However, the lack of credibility in the turn of events at some places and in particular, dramatic happenings during the closing stages of the novels, both of them, dwindled my appreciation for those novels. But still, I should say I liked those novels.

I was talking about my experience on reading “Five Point Someone” but I discoursed in another track. Fellow readers, I beg your pardon for that. Let’s get right into the subject matter. The three folks, I mentioned earlier competed among a large number of students and get into IIT, the place everyone is crazy to get into. But since the day they get there, disasters begin to happen. What they had thought while entering into IIT at the beginning doesn’t quite translate into reality. Although bright or let’s say competent to get into IIT, they can’t make it to the top once they are there and moreover they remain wandering at the bottom. They are the perennial five-pointers and have a great deal of trouble finding the right balance between their dreams, desires and study. And, in all these sharing of miseries, one thing however they gain is the deep bond of friendship among themselves.

At times, they feel hard-done by the IIT’s system and envisage ways to beat it, with some success but failure in most of the cases. Sometimes they divide the semester’s courses to study only a portion for each of them, and sometimes, they think the worthless assignment chores should be done in alternate basis, with one doing the job and rest just copying it. The peak of their attempts is however the attempt to steal the question paper from Prof. Cherian’s office. I shouldn’t be uncovering all details, for the sake of readers who might be reading it in future. So I won’t mention what happened after that. The book has inspirational elements too, especially via the character of Ryan, who is talented and innovative but refuses to follow the system, or say how others want him to do. He encourages us to look up for novelties rather than grades. In short, I really enjoyed the book. I think it is worth reading at least once. That’s what I’ve to say on the three five pointers!

I rate this book @ 4.0 on the scale of 5.0.  

 

लेख्नुथियो एउटा कविता

लेख्नुथियो एउटा कविता
तर मैले लेख्न सकिन
भन्नु थियो केहि कुरा
तर मैले भन्न सकिन

कसरी लेख्नसक्छु र भन्नसक्छु म?
हजारौंका बीचको  म!
पदार्थको फगत एक अणुजस्तो
पेन्टिंगको एक विन्दुजस्तो
अर्थ भएको हो कि विना कुनै अर्थको?
सान्दर्भिक हो कि असान्दर्भिक?

कसरी लेख्नसक्छु कविता?
कसरी भन्नसक्छु र म आफ्ना कुरा?
जब
मैले त्यो लेख्नु र भन्नुले
केहि फरक पार्नेछैन
जसरी सागरमा एक थोपा पानीले फरक पार्दछ

अथाह भीडमा एक मान्छेको
अर्थ के हुनसक्छ र ?
त्यसैले आज मैले कविता लेख्नसकिन!
आज मैले भन्न मन भएको कुरो भन्न सकिन!

I am a blogger now!

Some time ago, probably long time ago, well I can’t figure it out exactly. Well, let’s put it simple, two years ago, how earlier it was depends on the way you see it. Anyway, to cut things short, two years ago I had started my journey as a blogger and what a glorious journey it was, ending at the monumental feat of one article! Yes, my journey ended with just a single blog post. I don’t even remember where I had created my blog and what its title was. The single post, however as far as I remember, was about how my love for the movies began and it was kind of a review of the movie “Forrest Gump”. I wasn’t able to continue blogging because there were so many problems around the corner for me. The foremost was that of load shedding and I didn’t have enough backup on my laptop and even though I could write articles, it was difficult to post them as the internet would remain off. You might wonder why I didn’t just write the articles with whatever backup I had and post them whenever the lights would be on again. Well, that was simply because load shedding wasn’t the only thing that obstructed my what-would-have-been a glorious (as if I was destined to be one) blogging career. I had to cope with studies, lab reports, assignments and all such stuffs that this pursuit of an engineering degree endows upon us. Then, after that, I thought to be a regular and successful blogger, I would have to spend a large chunk of my time for blogging. Oh, how wrong I was then! Amid all those problems, the most important thing that I lacked was the desire, the will to continue what I started. I didn’t have that drive that kept me steady on my path. As always, as often has been the case in my life, I dream such big things and I strongly believe I can surely do those things. Whenever I first come across an idea, I think “Wow, this is great, incredible! I can do this, I’ll surely do it!” It never occurs to me that I can’t do it. But as time goes, that spirit dies. It fades just as it had erupted in the first place. Let’s not bore my keen readers. To put it simple, I couldn’t continue to blog.

Moving on two years from my first blog post about “Forrest Gump”, times have changed. I have lived through quite a turmoil on my part, hit by the stones, once in a while. Life hasn’t been like what I’d envisioned back then. I’ve lived through so much crashing of my dreams. But I don’t have any regret nor any complaint for others. I consider myself, solely myself responsible for where I stand now. Without those two years, I wouldn’t be the person that I’m today. In spite of all those troubles, I have also gained a lot from life, those invaluable lessons, which are going to shape my life for once and for ever. I have learnt to take action more often than to dream. I, in spite of wasting time on petty pursuits on several occasions during the past two years, have learnt to value the invaluable time and live through every moment in life. Most important of all, I’ve known what kind of mistakes a person can make and I can now be wise enough to not repeat those mistakes again.

The desire to live, the desire to explore, and the desire to move on in the beautiful journey of life had been grand and I was a relieved person once again, after a long time. I was searching for an outlet for my inner spirit, a channel through which I could explore myself. I was craving for a simple thing, a single opportunity that would instil back the confidence in me and that would make my belief in myself profound. And, in all that, I learnt about the “Blogging Competition” being organized by MIC Nepal that had on offer, a fabulous LUMIA 820 for the winner. This, I thought, was the perfect opportunity for me to come out of the nutshell. So I attended the program, created my blog, wrote an review on a Windows App about my beloved Inter, the club I’ve been supporting for four years. Then, I promoted it. I spent days and nights promoting my blog. I genuinely believed in myself and strongly felt that I could win the competition and LUMIA 820 would be all but mine. I even got my friend Mr. Saurav Raj Joshi, to provide his resilient voice, for the video review I’d included on my blog. With that video review, I thought my chances would improve greatly. Time passed by and the date the winner would be eventually declared arrived soon. I attended the prize distribution ceremony with huge hopes of winning the competition. I even pre-planned on how I would give a little treat to my friends, once I would win the competition. And, the prize was announced, the winner was declared. But to my shock and huge despair, the winner was not me. It was somebody else, whom I didn’t have a clue about.

I was a bit saddened at not being able to win that competition. Winning it was important to me not just for mere LUMIA 820, but for bringing back my belief on myself. But I didn’t win. I had no choice but to move on. And, immediately in the aftermath, a thought occurred to me. What if I could earn more than a phone through this event? The experience of the event was really pleasant. I even got to make so many friends through this event. But what if I could take the benefits to a greater level than making friends? It would be much better to move on from the anguish with a newfound discovery that evoked great vigor inside you than nothing. And, I felt restarting my journey as a blogger, the one that I’d dreamt often quite a long time ago but abandoned it much earlier would do the thing. So immediately I created my blog. And, through this blog, I wish to write on topics ranging from technology, music and movies to literature. I hope to do this on regular basis now and I think minimum of half an hour a day will be enough to sustain myself as a blogger. So from “Forrest Gump” to “LUMIA 820” and through all the ups and downs, I think I can finally call myself a blogger now. Yes, I am a blogger now!