INFLUENCES II: PAIN

“Pain is to my intellect what daffodils were to Wordsworth.”

When girls my age were just about getting a grip on the intricacies of their 28-day cycle, I was engrossed in exploring the dimensions of trauma. Every time there was a death in my physical or filial vicinity, my cerebrum seemed to run overboard with ideas and tales. Almost like a spurt for me to stretch my imagination to the expanse of space. I remember doodling the above line around then in my little notebook. It seems to have stayed with me for a long time now. The book, as well.

Marriages are an excuse to practise your fighting instincts. Our (both mine and my sister’s) formative experiences in this regard conditioned us to the futility of the much-vaunted institution. Normalcy was a desired state in the household. The son was a brown-headed delinquent, the daughter an obstinate kid. No known vice could be traced in any of the parents, yet the ground appeared to be amiss between them. Consequently, the kids could sense themselves to be unlike their peers from mundanely non-volatile homes. A fact they seem to have handled adeptly at hindsight.

Looking back at those tempestuous times of childhood, what seems to have helped me endure them was Richmal Crompton. Author of the very popular William series, her books were the ultimate guffaw in irreverence. They were my refuge after a dorky day in school which would invariably be followed by a harrowing time or two in the school bus. School buses, I can tell from my feeble learning in sociology, are a counter-culture in themselves. Dominated by species like the hen/cock-pecked teachers, love-infested doves and the venom-sputtering rowdies, their brand of education is the opposite of how things are perceived in Indian classrooms. The last rows of seats are occupied by the enlightened ones – the ones who can concoct the most noise. You can expect ample whistles and comments from their kind as a response to fortuitous events like bullying of a newbie, nearby traffic snarls and the appearance of eye candy within a radius of 25 feet around the bus. The quieter ones, usually huddling around the front seats, are yet to see the light. They are yet to realise the fact that the only way in which to come out mentally unhurt from your school days is to croak about your life and its instalments in the bus.

Buses and their ordeal notwithstanding, events like these really got my neurons wringing. If something set me thinking, it invariably had gray shades to it. I can hardly recall sitting resolutely in some corner to myself whenever the sky was blue. Blue brought with it endless possibilities and a brimless reservoir of energy. It was only when the skies were overcast that I found the time to sit down and listen to the innate echo. One of the quirkier things of existence is that happiness of any kind is often too good to be expressed adequately. Misery, on the other hand, can be painted pretty effectively to the observer. Wordsworth has been doing that for ages now. And we are all the more gloomy because of that.

BEING MEDIOCRELY MULTI-TALENTED 4: BEFUDDLED DWEEBS

Unlike other sane and supposedly in-the-box courses, our academics require us to think amidst the clutter. Those taking lectures (often friends, professionals and fellow junkies) are supposed to winzip topics fit to be taught over months into one single 48-minute session. Consequently, at any point of time, your mind is seldom mono-tuned. Imagine watching muted visuals of Saturday Night Live with Sex Pistols playing in the background while the smell of raw garlic permeates your sensory receptors. And now try thinking of a smart line to promote a flourishing chain of hotels. Now visualise doing it while you are thinking of an excuse to cover up for your Petronas-like cell phone bill at home. Or while you are figuring out a way to evade the wedding your folks are adamant at, once you graduate. Or even as the entire clan of dinosaurs seem to be running siege inside your stoned belly.

When Franz Ferdinand crooned about having things so much better, they could have very well been referring to the Bugsbunny. Like his altered name, he is a riot once on stage or screen but a pathetic shadow once the lights are out. All that his daily schedule entails is meeting different sets of friends at different points of time. They say that the guy who played Dracula in the earliest film of the same name needed to be reminded of his acting prowess every day. Pretty much the same could be said of Bugsbunny’s diffidence.     

 The primary objective of befuddled dweebs in life (yours incorrigibly, included) is to uplift their crassly selves. They come to college leaving behind a house full of constraints and worries. Felicity, for instance, struggles to balance the rigours of a 24/7 course with the restrictions of a dormitory with Talibanesque timings (1900 hrs IST in a city that is said to be an insomniac). Couple that with a more-than-passing interest in the flourishing art scene of the city. And maybe you can trace a reason for her thin-layered attendance you see every term. Faces, unlike bikinis, are seldom known to reveal more than what they hide. Wearing glasses only simplifies the Botox job.

Of all the four types, befuddled dweebs are the easiest to find in the classroom. Every fourth person you meet is finicky about making the leap into no-holds-barred professionalism. There are these strings of bonding, family ties, carnal demands, etc that perennially tug them down. As long as they stutter to shed their mental blues and gear up for the ride awaiting them, they will remain dweebs. Never mind the odd ‘we can, we shall’ cry.      

BEING MEDIOCRELY MULTI-TALENTED 3: ENERGY-SUCKERS

A major chunk of the winter term in my venerated course is devoted to the cause of college festivals. Nine-and-a-quarter festivals later, I have begun to ponder at the point of them all. At their worst, they are a dissipation of your time. Time that could very well have been spent in planting trees around our neighbourhoods. Exaggerations notwithstanding, even the good ones end up being gallery-pleasers. I remember the first festival gig I attended in the course – Polaris 2008. A month into the course at Wilson’s, we were engrossed in organising our very own extravaganza. I remember the bands playing at the gig – there were decent covers of Pink Floyd, Stone Temple Pilots being strummed around. Yet the only time I recall the crowd going ballistic was when a particular band strummed a Bollywood tune while testing their sound logistics.

What you see is what you get. If you ever need amplification for this adage, come and observe a BMM fest. Every section of the crowd –from the organisers to the participants will invariably have a character hell-bent on making you bend and show them the space they command. They will either be asking for pointless clarifications just to show you that he/she is the point person in the group.  Or they will be yelling out CIA-like pontifications on their walkie-talkies as loud as they can. BMM is strikingly consistent in churning out these types every year. Every batch in the 55 colleges in Mumbai has at least two of such types. For the sheer energy they expend in maintaining the facade of appearing important coupled with the strains of a limited vocabulary, I call them energy-suckers.

More often than not, the elevation of these energy-suckers comes piggybacking on people with real potential in them. If not anything else, Wilson’s BMM is dreaded in festivals for three years now due to its dance contingent. Naturally, there is an aura that surrounds them. Observing their rehearsals would however reveal to you that the nebula that radiates the aura is actually a black hole. The ones who can actually move their feet, prefer to just do their job and improvise. For the black holes though, practice presents a desired opportunity to boss around greenhorns and throw opinions wherever not necessary. If you have a project deadline tomorrow at 7:30 am, chances are that these energy-suckers will throw this titbit at you a minimum of 17 times as you sit awake all night doing the needful. For them, even a blank disc will do the job, as long as it is on time. Maintaining the masquerade of professionalism is important, more than actually being one. And lest you forget or don’t know, high marks look very good when put up on display boards.

A BMM classroom will never fail to entertain you. You will find opinions of all sizes and shapes thrown on everything under the sun and its devil-faced eclipse. Look out for the ones that are long and tangled but fail to throw up a single relevant nuance. And the ones that are littered with self-absorbing jargon like good but not great or the snore-inducing honestly speaking or frankly(opinions are ordained to be frank. That’s why your God created them in the first place, suckers). Nine times out of ten, these enlightening observations will be coming from an energy-sucker. My observation is that they end up joining the course lured by the outward glitz. For all that is worth exploring for novices in the realm of creativity and its off-shoots,   BMM is a better world without ‘em suckers. 

BEING MEDIOCRELY MULTI-TALENTED 2: ADHD AND THE PURSUIT OF PUSSIES

As my professor keeps yelling, (I suspect, even while asleep) we need to push our limits constantly. And we, as obedient students of the order, follow it to the hilt. We make it a point to gulp whisky from Coca-Cola bottles in the classroom, never mind the pickle-like aftertaste. We like to see off  out-of-town classmates from airports and railway stations at the end of every term. Correction: We like the act of seeing them off because it is usually accompanied by a round of boisterous hop-and-skip by the outgoing convict that passes off as dance, or a satiating sleepover session near the airport pavement. While at it, we will play dumb charades, regardless of how juvenile we appear to passers-by. Our syllabus gives us the licence to experiment with everything in the name of art and aesthetics. One of us, called ADHD, likes to extend the adage of pushing limits to relationships too.

First things first. ADHD is no way her real name. (We have a history of weird names, though. One of my juniors is supposed to be called Lithium). Her name, in fact, is the Sanskrit equivalent of dusk. Contrary to the implied meaning of her name, she detests everything dark, black and sombre. (At least, she says so)And in literal congruence to her name, she suffers from Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). You know the personal assistant in a corporate presentation who will raise a dumb doubt in a meeting only to make others notice her lipstick colour. Or, the girl who will fake falling beside your desk just that your eyeballs roll on the waxed legs. She is that type. While she does all of those eyeball-hogging antics, her dwarf-like height comes to her rescue. Consequently, your first impression of ADHD ends up being that of a kid trying to fit into her grown-up clothes. Truth be told, she is anything but that.

My heart goes out though for her boyfriend, The Ant. Before they started going out, he was the epitome of the beer-guzzling, couldn’t-care-less brat who did things as he wanted it. Along the way, he was one of the brightest minds in film-making since the inception of the course. He had his principles in life – guys he never ventured even a mile close to, time for friends that nothing could replace, secrets he would hardly divulge, wimpies he mocked and ridiculed at every go. The transformation, six months into the relationship, has been nothing short of astounding. He likes to tag along with her to hookah sessions with the wimpies, meeting his beer buddies only when he has had a fight, or drag them along when he desperately needs company. Somebody needs to tell him that uploading embarrassing videos of your mates is tantamount to breaking the lads’ code.

Everything is justified, for love and a laugh. Correction: Everything is justified to make your love laugh. Even if the affection and indulgence remains a one-way street, for much of the time. He forsook the chance to watch Avatar on a 3-D screen to do help her out with her chores. This coming from a connoisseur and creator of films confirmed my most obnoxious of fears. The Ant’s transformation into a pussy-pursuer stood complete at that juncture.

Everything that happens in life is a unique experience, one that needs to be absorbed in the pursuit of art and innovation - another of the aphorisms that our Papa professor likes to throw at us every now and then. The list of maladies however, is not restricted to these two in the course. There are energy-suckers and then there are befuddled dweebs. But this post deserves to end in memory of the beer-guzzling brat who passed away with his long locks and hoarse abuses. Not that The Ant would give a shit about it though.    

BEING MEDIOCRELY MULTI-TALENTED 1 : WE LOVE JUICE

There are times when you wonder if your head and mind resides in the right course, especially after a dangled phase of disillusionment with life and its priorities, in general. Bachelors of Mass Media, as they call it, is meant to help you fit into those over-sized multi-tasking boots that the fourth estate demands in the 3.0 age. Deadlines are sacrosanct, even if it comes at the expense of excellence.
One of my major issues with the course has been the amount of confusion it breeds. When I entered this booby-trap at Wilson’s, I had my mind and vital organ fixated on becoming a press journalist. One distinguished female anchor at CNN was a source of endless boners throughout my tweens. Another desk worker at The Times of India, New Delhi fitted my definition of violent attraction. Halfway through my first year in BMM, the display monitor of a Sony handycam replaced her as my muse. I relished dictating terms to it. I loved forcing the actors to undergo umpteen re-takes. I almost went to prison once for filming a barred place after trespassing on private property. I did not mind. As long as I had a camera with me, they could have very well put me inside bars for sedition.
Then came the army of David Ogilvy and Theodore Levitt, imposing upon us the beauty of an idea and the tact of selling. Kurosawa and Kubrick followed soon after, leaving us in further doldrums, with their fiddling of the three acts in a narrative. Gramsci and his cronies were never far behind, with their twisted and subdued ideas of domination and consent. Soon we were straddling without a life jacket in the waters of the Mississippi-sized creativity expanse. I still wanted a job that enabled me to write. But at the back of my mind was a niggle that I could earn decently as an account planner in some ad agency. I had more or less accepted my handicap at direction, but I still reckoned that I could make films better than Ed Wood.
All I knew about myself throughout these hurricanes of indecision was that I wanted to do something that stood out amidst a heap of employment applications. Something that was marked with a 6B black pencil, in bold perhaps. My professor would emphasize in every sermon that the ideas and figures that revolutionize the course of future events need to be small and simple. Consequently we were so obsessed with capturing the flickers and sparks that we let the fire rage, unhindered and unfettered.
By now, we are perfectionists at ignoring the broad canvas. We think Pat Robertson was diabolical in blaming the earthquake in Haiti on its national hubris, and we will rally full-throttle against it. We will come up with posters that espouse the futility of believing in Creation; we will make documentaries exposing the travesties of bishops (sexual or otherwise) since the inception of Christianity. We will, however, unremittingly ignore the Facebook campaign for humanitarian aid to assuage the 500, 000-plus victims of the calamity. As tyros in the information dissemination industry (the media fracas, in short), seniors unabatedly push and shove us to pursue juicy stories. Two years into the course, more juice is the buzzword. We love the hoopla that comes with selling a destination when we take up advertising in our final year. None of us would overtly confess to relishing the prospect of digging up stories in conflict-prone areas, which is what awaits us if we opt for journalism instead. Maybe, savouring juice is an essential part of human nature. No girl likes to suck the dry ones after all.