KADAL- A COMMENT AND A REPLY

Hi Ajithan, 

     very detailed and nuanced - if not a highly cerebral (wink wink :-))- review of the film. as someone with very little knowledge about cinema and its visual grammar, i learnt a lot from your review. thanks.

from what i understand, the expressionist tradition in cinema wants to highlight/emphasize the inner subjective experience/turmoil of characters, and cares more about the visual projection of inner experience. And in order to do this, it often purposefully distorts the surface reality to underscore a particular point. Movies like Faust, Metropolis and Nosferatu comes immediately to mind - philosophical theme, existential, filled with harsh streaks of light & shadows, silhouettes, asymmetries etc. 

KADAL

                          Sailing the sea of eternal conflict

  “This movie analysis has spoilers”

        Kadal (2013), ace Indian director Maniratnam’s new venture, is gloriously expressionist in the tradition of great movies of golden age like Charles Laughton’s ‘Night of the hunter (1955)’ a  thriller movie with similar plot elements of good vs. evil with different perspective.

      

AN EXCITING COMMENT

Udaya Kumar 

Dear Ajithan:

Greetings! My name is Udayakumar, a friend, reader and admirer of your dad. We met a few days ago here at Idinthakarai and he gave me your blogspot url. It took me a few days to get to it. I have gone through some of your representative works; let me tell you how impressed I am. Not because you are the son of a friend but because you establish yourself as a creative, thoughtful and reflective young Nature-lover. This country and the world need more and more young people like you. As Swami Vivekananda says, "A hundred thousand young men and women" such as yourself can and will change the fate of this Earth.

NIBBLING NATURE ALMIGHTY

 

          I happened to watch a video on YouTube recently. It is a stand-up comedy by George Carlin in which he digs on environmentalists (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eScDfYzMEEw). There is a part in the video where he raps “Our planet’s been through a lot worse than us. it’s been through Volcanoes, Earthquakes, plate tectonics, continental drifts, solar flares, sun spots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles, hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worldwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic waves, recurring ice ages and we think…..some plastic bags” well, sure I was laughing, not at the uncertainty as it is intended but the irony. Plastics can alter our environment in future not far less than the entire geographical and astronomical phenomenon he has mentioned, considering the massive scale it’s been produced.

INDIAN ROLE MODELS - A COMMENT

 Hi Ajithan, 

Very good set of articles. I enjoyed reading them. Lot of original thinking and lucid write-up. 

I especially liked the one of intuition. There is a fair amount of research going on currently in cognitive psychology on this subject. I've done a couple of studies in this area. If you wish to, could send some references about the current thinking in this line of research. I think you would enjoy reading about "dual process" theories of cognition, that tries to link tacit-associative mode of perception and judgement with conscious-analytic mode. Recent studies in this area try to theorize and test on how these two modes are not necessarily at tension with each other, but rather, are constitutive of one another. [Akin to what Poincare once said: logic is the instrument of demonstration; and intuition, the instrument of invention. Demonstration and invention often co-evolve.] 

MYNAHS ON THE PROWL

Ground feeding birds under the realm of opportunists

     

      Woke up in the morning listening to bird chirps, chuckles, gurgles and coos.Lying on the bed I fancied our Hibiscus tree studded with birds of blue, red, yellow, white and so on. After couple of minutes,finally making up my mind,picked myself up to reach the balcony and to my surprise, and slight disappointment, all I could see is a tree of noisy bunch of purplish brown birds, the Common Mynah¹. The incident, though it wasn’t possible then to perceive ample scale of the phenomenon- phenomenon of Common Mynahs taking over other ground feeding birds, stayed on me as an image, a notion.

The Common Mynah 

       

GREYED OUT OF MIND?-AN INTERESTING COMMENT

Rajesh Srivastava,

   I saw this site quite accidentally and exited to read this article. I noticed in your profile that you are still an undergraduate student. The language and presentation shows maturity of a senior research scholar. I wish to appreciate you for your natural brilliance and erudition.

I am not a man of science. My interests are in yoga and mysticism. I don’t know whether you are interested in it or not -probably not, because it needs an age and experience to enter in these kind of thoughts. 

As per our yoga tradition which is an integral part of Eastern mysticism we have four levels of mental existence. Jagrat, svapna,sushubti and durya. I may compare them with the modern psychological terms conscious, subconscious, unconscious and collective unconscious. Well, actually there is sharp difference between these eastern concepts and western terms. Western psychology assumes these states as structures and we think them as functional modes.