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Fairy Tales have had a profound effect on all human cultures. Not just old fashioned mythology, but rather the archetype of the fairy tale as we have come to know it in the last century or so. Before then tales and myths were often dark and foreboding, showing life in all its shades and complexities. Good was not always good, bad was not always bad and the hero didn’t always get the girl in the end with no harm done. Then somewhere along the way, our stories were sanitised. They became sweet and one dimensional. Good always triumphed, and people always lived happily ever after. This aspect of ultimate romantic triumph has particularly had a straight-jacketing effect on what a writer or story teller can consider acceptable narrative closure.

Recently I watched two pieces of film making on TV. A rare occurrence because I rarely watch TV any more. But these happened to catch me during a lull in my otherwise busy mental schedule, and they held my attention enough for me to sit through them, ugly commercial breaks and all. One was a Sci-Fi disaster extravaganza and the other was yet another 3D Computer Graphic funny flick, but I liked them both to varying degrees. What made me think of them as a cohesive pair to write about together is that both movies didn’t fare very well at the box office, and neither of them ended with a passionate kiss.

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My memories of reading as a child and of children’s books are a little strange.

The reason I mention those as two separate issues is precisely what I mean by “strange”. As a child, at the beginnings of the age at which “reading” started to make some sense, I discovered a large dusty tome stored away in a forgotten shelf when I was helping my Mother with some spring cleaning one afternoon.

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The rule of the masses, what we like to affectionately call “democracy”, has been on my mind a lot lately, especially since I commented on Darren Rowse’s post about a new service called Linebuzz. Democracy is all about the effects of, and the interaction within, vast communities of people. You can’t really understand the effect that large groups of people have on the world, until you understand what affects these large groups of people. Since the advent of mass media, vast swathes of the population have been touched by world events and important turning points in world history and human endeavour. It is said most people who were alive and sober in the 60’s have a clear memory of what they were doing when they first heard the news of Neil Armstrong taking his one small step on the powdery lunar surface. So, I think it very appropriate to start this post with a simple question: what were you doing during the great Digg user riot of 2007?
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The concept of crashing a wedding, or any other large and noisy gathering of human beings for that matter, is very clear and well understood. The crasher tries to gain access to the said public gathering without the luxury of approval in the form of an invitation. So clear is this phenomenon in the minds of the general population that this complex social interaction has been reduced to a single representational term that is fathomed by even the most naive citizens of the world. They named a mass-market romantic comedy after it, for God’s sake. How complicated can it be?
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A trip to India usually includes a very liberal dose of cinema tickets for me. On this trip the first film to catch our attention was Babel. So on a random day when the mood struck us, my Dad, Vishal and I took a long bus ride to South Bombay and stepped into the historical Regal Cinema for our fix. The next day Babel won the Golden Globes Best Picture award. But a few hours before that I had walked out of the darkness of the cinema hall and I loved what I had just seen. In spite of the minor vandalisms by the Indian Censor Board, Babel was quite simply a beautiful piece of cinema. Movies are very much like people, and very much like people we can love them for many different reasons. There are those people who make us laugh, and those that make us feel special, and those that inspire us or make us proud. But if you look carefully you eventually find a small minority that we like not for these sometimes self-centred reasons, but essentially because they are simply impeccable human beings. They are bright and shining standards for the rest of us to live up to. Babel is that kind of movie.
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