After a few hectic days, I finally have enough time to resume blogging. Haven't been up to all that much in the past few days, have been feeling somewhat sedated. Maybe it's something to do with the weather here in Ahmedabad, it's been raining continuously for the past 4 months or so. Reminds you of the kind of Biblical floods that sent Noah into his Ark. Today the institute was flooded with water and I'm sure the strength of the student body has diminished in the past few hours. A moment of silence for our braves lost at sea. Noah's flood was supposed to be God's way of punishing sins like greed, avarice and dishonesty. Do we have any such things here? Let's not dwell on that question, too painful to answer perhaps.
Anyway, I went to watch a movie called James last week. Can't say I followed much of the story, but that was primarily because there wasn't any. The script had more gaps than the heroine's attire. It was a movie full of unapologetic, gratuitous and unabashed violence, blood, gore and shameless displays of skin. I loved it.
The hero seems like that famous picture of a man by Da Vinci, which has him at full stretch in a wierd circle. I bet his pectorals weighed more than his heroine. Anyway, he suited the role and a few of his action scenes were really impressive. Jat's the way to go I guess. I forget the heroine's name though, she's the one with black hair (too generic a description for Bollywood heroines) and an aversion to wearing clothes (even more generic). It was an unconventional movie in many ways, there is no forced mushiness betweem the hero and the girl, the movie stays true to a very simple plot of a small town guy, who has strong ideals and doesn't mind flinging a few uppercuts to adhere to them. A lot of angst and violence against an unfair and exploitative system, which I guess appeals to us Indians because inside us many of us harbour a desire to unleash violence on the injustice we encounter in our lives. Living vacariously I guess. Seems so much easy on screen, throw a punch here and there and the villain's dead, everything over.
Another exception was that they kill off the girl during the movie. In any other movie I would have suspected that the heroine's costume budget was getting out of hand, so termination became imperative, but I don't think that claim is tenable in this case.
Apart from that spent some time chatting up with friends and general introspecting. Realized how much I've changed in the past 5 years. When I was a naive 17 year old entering IIT Delhi, there seemed so much in this world worth fighting for, worth dying for. Now at age 22, there is nothing. Once you have nothing to die for, how do you live? I guess to an extent, every IITian's story is the same. You're led to believe that you're intelligent and so you enter IIT thinking that you'll change the world, bring about some kind of an intellectual revolution, be at the cutting edge of science. Then over a period of 4 years you realize that the world is doing fine, thank you and it doesn't want a revolution. All the high level physics and maths you learnt doesn't matter an iota when you get out into the real world where you're either doing coding or doing some routine maintenance job in an industry. I remember thinking why some of the brightest minds in India chose to be professors at IIT Delhi when they could be making millions in industry. I've finally got my answer...they're just bored. Every day at work can't be as challenging as rocket science, otherwise the whole human race would be unemployed. So that's where the disillusionment begins and over a period of time, it starts chipping away at the edifice of everything in which you believe.
However, I suppose that is the inevitable conclusion of every naive, childhood ideal and every impractical dream of youth, smashed against an impenetrable wall of the real world. Something tells me that it's not over yet and there is a lot more to come.
Wish I could throw a few punches a la James and get it out of my system...but it's more like shadow boxing, no real villains out there.