Digging for Meaning

"Look at that. A girl smoking! A girl should not be smoking cigarettes." After watching a play at the Kamani Auditorium in Delhi, I was leaving on an auto rickshaw towards CP. It is the heart of the capital region - fashion, cultural, business & political nerve center. And the navigators of this nerve center - the auto wallahs, the cabbies - are largely migrants, who bring with them the medieval India's twisted ideas of morality. Its amazing how far apart the worlds of the navigator and his customers are.  (though not necessarily from different moral molds.) On the way to CP, we crossed a couple of college students and among them was a girl who was smoking a cigarette. Upon seeing her, a spontaneous statement came out loudly from my auto driver's mouth. The first statement uttered in the journey so far. He sees a girl smoking and out pops a strong moral statement that he felt strongly about. "A girl should not be smoking cigarettes." I asked him i...

I feel cheated when subjected to literary works or cinema. The good art, good cinema is characterised by a focussed thought, a focussed reasoning that while being genius and revolutionary, is at the same time blinding and constraining. I see people bound up by the beauty of these constructed worlds, never to admit the world around as their own. Well, that’s not my reason o f complain though, I don’t read too much, only as much as my curiosity and hunger wishes, nor do I allow myself to fall away in quotidian stupor by keeping my curiosity and hunger for wisdom sharp on the granite of my senses. I try and absorb and diffuse the wisdom garnered from the art through me around me, trying to comprehend the world through it, trying to see the beauty that lay hidden beneath. I only have 2 eyes; maybe the author’s/artist’s eyes would lend me some new vision... My reason of complain is that that art, resplendent with the genius in it, binds me to its reasoning, to its ideals (at least for a ...