Love, Lust and Marriage

the unspoken words
if spoken
that graceful feeling
will the kindness ever last?
the silence and touch
if broken
the solo sailing
in the unchartered waters
drowns in the storm

the unspoken words
if spoken
that invigorating feeling
will the rawness remain pure?
the silence and touch
if broken
the thrill of anticipation
when our blood gushes
douses in the mundane

the unspoken words
if spoken
that dreaded feeling
will the impasse ever pass?
the silence and touch
if broken
the shared moments
where we faced the odds
comes to nothing

Movie Review - Prendre le large(Catch the Wind)

This movie envisages a situation where a working class person from a developed country(France) moves to a developing country(Morocco) for work. There are multiple themes running in this movie that I found interesting. The movie is political correctness in its most rational form.


Kitchen
Edith (the French working class woman) doesn't get her own lunch box and looks for Cafeteria in her Moroccan factory(which of course doesn't have one). She loves cooking and says it relaxes her. Here cooking has become a leisurely enjoyable activity for even the working class women of developed countries. The routine cooking has been left to the service industry. In a way, even a working class person generates the jobs in a developed world.

Islam
Islamic fundamentalists are viewed as a regressive force. The example of this regressiveness is shown through their charity work. Charity is a means to spread their regressive outlook. So relatable.

The menfolk
An educated Moroccan is helpful and civil to Edith. However, he thrashes a poor boy, who was helping her, thinking that the boy was going to rob her. He even cautions her to be careful with the strangers. The educated Moroccan basically demonstrates the stereotypical class feelings within the country, however, the person who robs her later does come from the country's dark underbelly. Then there was a male who offered her a strawberry picking job at the expense of his own countrywoman. That might show some third world men's unhealthy obsession with the first world women in their preference and treatment.

The womenfolk
The good women are the ones who don't wear burkha, be it Mina, her landlady, or Karima, her best friend in the factory. Mina is a divorcee who lives her life on her own terms. She brings up her son in liberal values as he is cool with her single lifestyle and casual dating. The villain, sort of, Najat, a woman in burkha. Najat, of course, has a backstory. Her fiance had moved to France and instead of sending for her, married the local woman. Now she's bitter about life in general and the foreigner in particular. Here we see the alienation felt by the section of the population where one section enjoys the fruits of liberalism but doesn't carry the remaining along with them. Even though her own culture is suppressive of her free movement, her bitterness is towards the people who are free but don't take the responsibility of freeing others. Further, we see how this bitterness further degenerates into inhumanity. When Edith files a complaint about her incompetence, she takes the revenge not just on Edith but also on hapless Karima.

The gap
After failing to be a working-class woman in Morocco, Edith goes back to France. Her friends in France had cautioned her that her severance package was far better than whatever she gets in Morocco as a salary in redeployment and also about the pitiable working conditions. Both turned out to be true. But she sells her home in France and goes back to Morocco to start a restaurant along with Mina. So, even though she's a working-class woman in France, her social capital is such that she could become a bourgeois in Morocco.

ನಡುಹರೆಯ

ಇದ್ದದ್ದರಲ್ಲೇ ನೆಮ್ಮದಿ ಎಂದರೆ ಪ್ರತಿ ಬೆಳಗು ಬದುಕ ಅಸಹನೀಯವಾಗಿ ನೀಳವಾಗಿಸುವುದು
ಮತ್ತೇನಾದರು ತೊಡಗುವ ಎಂದರೆ ಪ್ರತಿ ಇರುಳು ಬದುಕ ಹತಾಶಕರವಾಗಿ ಕುಬ್ಜಗೊಳಿಸುವುದು 

Nothing happened

It was lit but maybe it wasn't
fluorescence merged with the night
The mood was ecstatic without the high
and it started but nobody knew why
We two were Thomas Hardy's natives
as we chased them up the hill
Heard them run down and giggle
It was a new dawn in the shades
We were free in the chasing spree
But the light showed the other's face
We saw something we didn't feel
Ashamed we were Tolstoy's characters
for the thought crimes though not real
"Let's stop and sit here"
So we said unto each other
and we stopped and sat forever

ನಲಿವು

ನನ್ನ ನಲಿವು ಗಾತೀಯವಾಗಿ ಏರಿದೆ

ಮಿತಿಕೆಳಗಿನ ಡ್ರೇಯ್ನ್ ಕರೆಂಟ್ನಂತೆ

The invisible mark on the ground

The kids waiting for the school bus make an orderly line every day. The position corresponds to the order of their arrival to the Bus Point. This time there were two queues. One girl standing on her own. The other three standing in a queue. The lonely girl is in the third standard. In the second queue, the girl in the front is in the fourth standard. The other two, a boy and a girl, are in the third standard, with the girl being the classmate of the lonely girl. The lonely girl takes the bus occasionally and the other three are the regulars.
There was an altercation.
Lonely Girl: This is cheating. I came here first so you should stand behind me.
Front Girl: No, We always stand here.
Lonely Girl: But what is the difference? We are standing next to each other.
Front Girl: No, this is where we need to stand.
Lonely Girl: Is there a mark on the ground?
Front Girl: We know where to stand.
Boy standing next: Yes, she’s correct. She is always first to come here. And she knows where to stand.
Lonely Girl: But where is the mark? I came first and I’m standing right here. What difference will that make?
Front Girl: We should always stand in this line.
Girl standing last: Yes, she(Lonely Girl) knows nothing about the lines.
Lonely Girl(exasperated): But where is the mark? This makes no sense. We can stand here or here or there. What is the problem?
Boy standing next: No, we should always stand in the correct line. She (Front Girl) knows where to stand.
Girl standing last: Yes, she doesn’t come regularly so doesn’t know the correct line.
One of the elders had enough of it.
Elder: There is no mark. You can stand anywhere. But whoever comes first has the right to start the line.
The boy was bit intimidated and made a movement to stand behind the Lonely Girl but observed that the other two girls didn’t budge from their positions. He too stood in his place.
The Lonely Girl emboldened by the force of support positioned herself at the front of the ‘correct line’. None spoke.

Non-English European movies

I visit the USA once a year. I try to watch non-English European movies on board the flight. These are overwhelmingly French and few German. I increasingly observe that the soundtrack part of the movies is mostly in English. I wonder why. Is it because English pop music covers the wide range of our emotions and moments in life that can't be matched by music in any other language?

Book Review - One Hundred Years of Solitude

This book is supposedly the one with great literary merit. But all the literary flourish, however, is lost on me. Once upon a time, the inability to grasp the descriptive and flowery language used to frustrate me but now I've made my peace with that. I hope dormant reading of descriptive language doesn't make me miss the overall understanding of the situation.

After 1984, this is another book that I may not be able to complete. I found some of the passages troubling. One passage reads like author's fantasy about sexual harassment and racism and the other paedophilia.

The past world was brutal, patriarchal and racist. I do not have a problem with characters showing those behaviours. However, what I find difficult to accept is the victims endorsing it as if that's the way of life. There I can't help but think, it's not the victims but the author who is speaking on their behalf. And he's endorsing such behaviours.

I'm not sure why Aureliano needed to marry a barely major Remedios. Frankly, I don't find anything in the plot that shows any significance to that relationship. I guess generating shock value just for the sake of it.

A bigger problem is Arcadio's relationship with the "Gypsy" girl. It reads like an exploitative passage from some pulp fiction. There are two problems with this section. First, the girl accepts his harassment as some kind of courtship. Second, since it's a Roma girl, I believe, that's some kind of stereotype about their lifestyle. When these two things are together I believe that becomes highly racist sexism.

ಯಾಚನೆಯ ದೂರಾನುಭಾವ

ಸೀನು ತೆಗೆದು ಹೇಳಿದಳು ಅವಳೆ

ನೆನೆಯುತಿರುವರು ಆರೋ ಎನ್ನನಿಂದು

ಏನು ಅದು ಗೊಡ್ಡು ಬಿಡು ತರಳೆ

ಎನುತಿರುವೆ ಇಲ್ಲಾ ಆಕ್ಶಿ ಎಂದೆಂದು