Digging for Meaning

Two weird things happened today. one. While walking back home, on the way there was a band baja barat going in celebration of Navratri. The bandwallahs had just started the ruckus and people were crowding around at the crossroads where the band was playing. There was a clear difference between people who were clearly excited and stopped there, and the ones who walked away while glancing back from time to time. The one's who were walking away either had construction helmets or were wearing formal clothes with tucked in shirts. Both kinds were migrant laborers. While the first kind were busy building their lives through houses for others in this alien city, the latter were building theirs by sitting at one place for most of the day in air conditioned rooms. People who called this lovely city as their home, waited in excitement of celebrations to follow. Migrants like me walked away eagerly to go home to wash away the day in a nice cold shower. Its weird, this feeling of being a...

Ordinariness has such melancholic grace to it. Perhaps, its the finality of its evident fall that leads to submission, that stillness. Just saw the movie ' The illusionist '. Its script was written by Jacques Tati , one of the most wonderful film makers ever. Most of his movies are keen empathetic witnesses to the effect of modernity on a simple human existence. When I saw his movie, 'playtime', I was spellbound with the many layers of stories woven in a comic portrayal of  a man navigating a modern city. Watching the Illusionist, reminded me of the fragility of our identity. The movie is about a magician who is finding it more and more difficult to get work due to advent of modern entertainment of rock music and television. One scene is especially telling, when people in the cities are not at all interested in his acts, while in a village in Scotland, his acts gets appreciated. A woman tags along being awestruck with his ways. He tries to earn more to keep her happy,...