This is a freakishly small world and I hate that it is so. A Mallu guy I met two weeks ago, a friend now, is working as a production manager, in Chennai, for a Hollywood film made by a Taiwanese man based on a book authored by a Spanish-born Canadian writer. Yesterday, my brother comes into my room and tells me that his friend works as an assistant director for the exact same film.
Where are the rest of the famous one billion people of India? Where are the rest of the 70 lakh people of Chennai? What the hell is wrong with this world and something as random as a Hollywood film is connected to me through two wholly different means? I am sick and tired of meeting someone through someone I already know. This is precisely why I loved my time in Delhi, except for the obvious connect to Chennai. I went there thinking that it'd be a clean new city where I knew none of its how-many-ever inhabitants and nobody knew me. It gave me such a wonderful opportunity to be myself, to an extent at least. I was put into a cage where social contact was mandatory to get work done, alienation didn't work as much as it did whilst I was in Chennai. So sometimes, I had to go out of my way and ask people for favours. Of course, some characteristics are the same irrespective of whether people knew you before or not.
It gave me the opportunity to do something that we rarely get to do. Enter a room, the inhabitants of which are as clueless as you are, and build, maintain, spoil, enjoy and even cherish newly formed relationships. It wasn't like school when I was either too young or too naive to make my own decisions free of inhibitions and obligations. It wasn't like college when a troubled past followed me and emphasis lay on academics which I was least interested in. My year in Delhi made me realise things about myself that I couldn't have ever done had I remained in Chennai.
As Murphy was busy with other people for a change, I met some wonderful people. People who challenged me in ways I wasn't ever before. Finally, all those weird and fancy sounding movies that I spent watching, analysing and deconstructing became conversation starters. It was, to be meek, magical to see the directions a discussion beginning with a scene/dialogue from a movie took. I felt like a child in a candy store, being exposed to intellectual debates and being challenged to raise my game to even understand it, let alone be a part of it.
As luck would have it though, I had to come back home. I guess we know how that worked out.
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My idiotic mind has finally wrapped its head around an idea for a film. I've always felt I would be able to make at least a semi-decent film if I was able to hit the mark on what sounds like a good idea. A film needs an idea, a ruddy good one. The knowledge of thought has made me throw some good ones out of the window in the past, but this one, the thought that I have zeroed in on, is what I believe is enough to create a film out of.
Control, is something that comes naturally to us. But what if there was no need to exercise that control? What if there arose a situation wherein some of the usual reasons why we exercise control become redundant? If you could, would you? Tons of things come into the picture. Morality, societal taboos, consequences (imaginary, thought and unprecedented), time etc play a huge role. How would the removal of one of those variables affect the equation? This is something I want to explore.
Meanwhile, it is extremely easy to get lost in these questions and there can never be a definitive answer. Ergo, I must exercise control to stop at one point and put that into visuals. It's a ruddy small world, and I hate that.
