Resolutions and poor me!

1

Around this time every year a chunk of overwrought Homo Sapiens, make it a point to look back (in anger?) at the rotten residuum of their past eccentricities. New Year's Eve of late has transmogrified to a day when skeletons of the past years are exhumed, and you know what that means! People run for their desks and pencil down their to-do lists of things which will act as their salvation in the upcoming New Year. Hence, whole lists of resolutions are platted out with the intention of reinventing oneself and giving oneself another chance in the upcoming year. But keeping up with the resolutions has proved to be as difficult as keeping up with the Kardashians, for though written with the best of intentions, we slowly and steadily always manage to find out ways to break these promises to self. Not civil, you may say, and I agree in total with you. But think of resolutions as our nasty parents judging us with their censorious and austere looks; when faced with eyes like that, baby, you chuck it and run for your lives. Take it or leave it resolution lists are a bit elaborate, and without a doubt, stuff that are easy to make but difficult, if not impossible, to follow. Then why on earth do we make them, you ask? Because we very well want us to be better, nobler, finer individuals, and this wish becomes strong and overwhelming around the time of the bottom of the year thereby inducing us to create lists of worthwhile resolutions.

2

                                              

This year I have managed to curve on the imaginary stone a random list of resolutions I have promised myself to keep by hook or by crook.  Having undergone a pitiless self-scrutiny, I have realized that my life needs order. More often than not I have felt myself suffer from the lack of appreciation of routines. I hate monotony, and the fact that monotony on a daily scale is otherwise referred to as routine, gives me the pip. A daily order is just what the physician would prescribe, provided I visit a physician with my problem, that is, still routine is what I need. A well laid out daily time table with strict headlines from the start of the day till I head for the dreamless is getting the first spot in my resolution list. The requirement for getting up early, writing for one whole hour everyday, eating a proper breakfast, and generally speaking living a wholesome life are things the first resolution entails.

3

  

Trailing behind this painful ruling is another death-trap, a sordid resolution: spend less time on Facebook, Orkut, and less money on Amazon. I am sure I have spent a fortune on the aforementioned three, and sometimes I couldn’t help but wonder if the new cool features on Amazon are the result of the capital I gladly transferred into their trouser pockets. Books uplift your mind; they are frigates that take you faraway, and they cost money! What can you do? Even mental fortification comes with a crispy dollar sign. And now, a word or two about Facebook, Orkut and other such rotten devices of distraction, Let me tell you something, dear friends, there is no better way to while away your time than social networking. The people who created them are geniuses of the first order. The websites are addictive, and even though you know very well that you care a rat about your friend’s notification and her change of status, you can’t help but have a peek. And one peek leads to another, and before you know it there you are skimming through the notification list or playing games, and generally speaking, polluting the virtual world with our own webtrash. I often feel that social-networking is like indulging in a decadent dessert; for although a medium dose of three teaspoon is the recommended intake, we tend to gorge in the entire the plate and hope for more. Well, I am about to give up my gluttonous web-apetite and head to the prospective life improvement forum, if you know what I mean. This is going to be very tough, I hear myself say. Let’s see how long you can put up with this nonsense says my skeptic meta-voice.

4

                                           

The year of 2010, you would doubtless agree, had been a year which required us to defenestrate our prejudices and welcome a new tech-savvy life. In the last year we have seen innovations that even five years ago have been looked at as stuff of the dreams. After the rocking success of 3D, the i-Pad, etc, you cannot anymore ignore the importance of technology in our lives. This year I am making it a point to be tech-savvy and learn more about the marvels of scientific innovation and technology. I am amazed by the excogitations in the scientific world. Who would have thought that space travel could be a possibility? Or that one day we could chat with our distant world-neighbor residing on the other side of the face of the world via a computer! I mean, take it or leave it, technology is a booming new tradition, and I cannot allow myself to be a misoneist anymore. In the past I have often craved for a reboot of the vintage style, a time-travel back to that sepia-toned old-age life of retrograded prosperity. The above idea frequently haunted me after I had caught sight of Snookie and her gang romping in their debauched television series Jersey Shore. The very sight of Snookie, and the innumerable do-nothing housewives, always made me wish to run to the other end of the life quarter. I heard they thought of dropping Snookie last night in place of the crystal ball at the Times Square New Year bash. But alas, we weren’t that lucky!

5

 The most important resolution in my list has to be my fourth resolution: read more books. I have always considered myself an avid reader and generally find myself curled up with a good hardback or paperback before heading for the dreamless. But I realize that more hours of reading is what I require. I still have an unfinished Updike volume incubating on my bookshelf. You know what's funny, every time I pick up that collection of essays, and another book of words, I break the record for the most yawns in a minute. I mean I literally doze off. Not that Updike is uninteresting or anything or the words totally unrelated to modern life, it is just that those two tomes have proven to be highly somniferous for no apparent reason. And like them, I have a ton of others, including some travel treatises, a collection of Dostoevsky, which I have thankfully half-finished, and Tolstoy's War and Peace that must be read this year, provided I could keep myself awake.

In the personal quarter my year of 2010 has proved to be positively incandescent. I have had developed worthwhile relations with people of the same mental setup. This year I am thinking of broadening the social horizon. This is my fifth and final resolution. Getting to know people is what I think the call of the day. Give up sofalizing and bring in the good old spirit of hospice. Of course, a certain tact and diplomacy is called for when you are spreading your social wings, but I guess that last year has taught me some cool people handling tricks. I wish to exercise them.

6

With the incomprehensive list of promises at hand I take my first step toward this New Year. 2011 and all its possibilities for better of for worse stare at me with an unblinking gaze, and I propose to walk on, holding my head high, my hand proudly displaying my wonder list of resolutions--my salvation that might help me survive in this topsy-turvy ride of existence in a modern era. My computer smiles at me tenderly. I haven’t touched the damned social-networking pages more than once since this morning. A voice inside me, a soft lingering tone, and what this lingering tone is telling me is that I might have a new update on Facebook. One click would take me there; just a click, isn’t that wonderful? One click won't harm me, will it? Just this one time perhaps…hmm… I wonder what it is that is waiting for me on Facebook!  Oh, dash it! Resolutions suck. Boo….

                                                                   Happy New Year!!!

1. CNN i-Report: http://ireport.cnn.com/docs/DOC-535674
2. Open Salon: http://open.salon.com/blog/spectrum_voice/2011/01/01/resolutions_and_poor_me

Picture Courtesy: 1. ustmidlife.wordpress.com

                           2. downturk.info

                           3.  no-facebook.sosyomat.com

                           4. :cartoonaday.com

                           5 candycoateduniverse.wordpress.com

                           6.dreamscometrue.sulekha.com

                          Other pictures also from the internet.

Publication in ken*again

Read my story "Damaged Goods" in the latest issue of the literary magazine ken*again: http://kenagain.freeservers.com/PROSE.HTML#saha

Film Review: Black Swan

  

Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan strikes you as a well narrated tragic masterpiece where the protagonist's flaw in character is her child-like innocence. The drama narrates the strange vicissitudes of the life of a young ballerina as she sheds the raiment of mollitude and adorns the evil prowess of a femme-fatale. In a broader sense, it is a story of art consuming the artist.

The dream like movement of the plot is well threaded with the wonderful choreography, and Natalie Portman comes out as a sensational queen of both drama and dance. She is perfect; her face a pool of emotions, each sentiment is penciled into her features with deft mastery.

For years the pious Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman) has served her term in a New York ballet company mastering her techniques and generally polishing her act, but what she lacks is the acting prowess. The company having suffered an alteration of fate, the director Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel) decides to rejuvenate the under the weather corporation by recasting the classical Swan Lake. He selects the naïve Nina to play the role of the protagonist, even though he is unsure of her prospects in the portrayal of the black swan, the double of the pious white swan, and this is where the conflict strikes. A clattering windmill of admonitions, cheering ups and even sexual stimulations could not fully unveil darkness in the angelic diva. What Leroy doesn’t realize is that Nina is too unpretentious to don the dark attire without hurting herself in the process. She is gullible, she is scared. Under the authority of her overbearing mother Erica (Barbara Hershey), Nina is a child of subservience lacking heavily in the power to assert herself. But her journey to the realm of darkness begins with the advent of her competitor Lily (Mila Kunis), a sexually deviant female exuding the aura of darkness in every breath. She is a natural "black swan," and Thomas Leroy casts her as Nina's alter in the drama. Feeling thwarted and wronged Nina peels off her suave exterior and displays the characteristics of the dark, primeval self.

The thrilling suspense of the movie grips you from the beginning. The atmosphere of darkness, the cerebral horror, Nina's doppelganger, all predict a grim finale for the narrative. The disturbing scenes of graphic injuries send chills down your spine and you are left with the cardiac organ getting crazy inside your rib-cage.

Black Swan is a perfectly written gothic novel where each scene is chronologically threaded with the next. Despite the marked ambiguity of certain events, Black Swan comes out as a drama that doesn’t require a high gray-matter content to decipher. Of late, several Hollywood pieces (Inception, for example) have used the decipher-it-yourself technique in their works leaving a sizeable portion of audience vying for the correct interpretation of the cinematic riddle, and thereby making them focus their attention on the mathematical calculation rather than on deriving pure pleasure from the motion picture. But appreciation of art is not a forced process; it is natural and spontaneous. Black Swan deftly balances this artistic truth with perfect harmony, and the resultant magnum opus therefore comes out flawless and un-blemished. The subtle movements in the plot, the astounding visual effects and the incommensurable depth in the story leave the audience spell-bound. Never for a moment the plot seems thin or dragged out, never does the director lose his focus. In fact, the entire effort shows so much perfection that I, like many of my co-viewers, sat appreciating the work even after the final credits have rolled.

A review of Black Swan would be incomplete without a paragraph of homage to its protagonist. Natalie Portman has surpassed herself in the role of Nina. She is beyond perfect. She is a cross between an arch-angelic superwoman and a half-baked adult with no sexual experience. Her transmogrification strikes us as the wrath of hell. I still feel the goosebumps on my skin when I recall the miniate-eyes of the black swan. Portman's academic background as a pupil of psychiatry has undoubtedly helped her drink in the tricky role to perfection. She has come a long way from the brat in the Closer; she seems more matured. Her final words go through you like a pair of sharp knives inflicted on an already wounded surface. "That was perfect," she says as volumes of unspoken emotion fill her eyes, and then she empties her lungs; an artist sacrificed at the altar of art.

The supporting cast in the movie balances the spectacular lead performance. Mina Kunis is exquisite as Lily. She too seemed matured and out of the cocoon of Jackie (Kunis's character in "That 70's show"). She is a woman of great attraction, not the starry eyed teenager in love with unicorns. Barbara Hershey as Nina's imperious parent seems more like the wicked witch holding the pretty princess captive rather than a mother-cum-career-coach of her ballerina daughter. Winona Ryder as Beth also deserves a round of applause. Despite appearing in only a handful of scenes, her presence is vital in the drama.

The chiaroscuro like cinematography is breathtaking, and so are the editing and sound effects. The director Darren Aronofsky plies with the audience's expectation and unfolds before their eyes a drama of a lifetime. This epic tale of innocence killed at the hand of its vicious replicate is one of the best cinematographic renderings in 2010. After Christopher Nolan's Inception, Black Swan comes out as the second biggest hit of the year.

 

My Rating: ********** Ten out of ten. 

 

P.S. CNN i-Report of the review: http://ireport.cnn.com/docs/DOC-531014

       IMDB link of the review: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0947798/usercomments-126

 

 

 

 

Snowy Nashville:-)

Let it snow!