Chutzpah.

Sunday morning, simmering tea and Haider. Then saw it again last night (Torrents FTW). And still playing it on my TV while writing this piece. I am still in complete awe and the last time a movie enthralled me this much was Black Friday. Not to forget, "chutzpah".

Watching a movie is a fairly complicated process for me. For starters, I can always visit Anshul Purswani's timeline and get a firsthand, Bhopali review of all the five movies screened for that week (a process which he describes "HECTIC") and move on. But in most cases it is not limited to that alone. I need to know the backdrop, I want to know whether it is a copied script, or a typical Allies vs Axis WW II flick, or a no holds barred gravity defying remake remake of a South Indian hit. I need to know which book it was adapted from, who wrote that book, then search that writer on Google and Goodreads. I check on the nominations it received, then look up the hash-tag on Twitter. Then if I am convinced, maybe I'll watch it. Simple process right.

Movies genres are the closest you come to the word assorted. You have movies like Haider which come once in a while, movies which shake you up and make you think beyond the actress's legs. Then there are literal no-brainers like Happy New Year which make you sad for SRK. As much as you want a cult classic like Haider Gangs Of Wasseypur, you need these lesser movies to make you realize their importance. Chutzpah all over again. You can't live with something, and you need the other to make the first one tick.

I'll tell what else is chutzpah: pseudo-intellectualism. Pretending that you understand what Nimmi, Dolly or Ghazala was up to in Maqbool, Omkara and Haider respectively. That you understand the tragedy in Miyan or Omkara's romance. The multiplex thing has damaged the movie culture as now the movie matters less than your check-in and your tags. I am no different, and having not read Shakespeare at all, had little idea about what was coming up next. Less chutzpah than you guys I dare say!

And before you forget it, it's the the 30th Anniversary of the Bhopal Gas Tragedy this year. Will be writing about it, some pointers are welcome. Till then ciao.

Season's Greetings.

Okay how did Aguero miss that. He hit Spurs for four a week back. And why didn't Arsene Wenger re-sign Alex Song.

Anyway, back to the present. Season's greetings. Sincerely hope that your "Happy Diwali" wasn't as fake as Katrina's Hindi accent and you didn't waste two hours of your precious life watching an ashen SRK in Happy New Year. I mean that is harakiri, you should find a more innovative way of wasting your time like me.

Three days back I thought that this four day break will serve every purpose that I have been saving for the last four months but I spent most of it lazing around, eating sweets (sweet tooth you see) and thinking about what I could have been doing instead. Virtual high five if share the sentiment. This one thing has never changed about Diwali holidays, and in spite of my GM dragging me to the dais to explain Who Moved My Cheese to the rest of the staff, I love the fact that this one thing hasn't changed. I think that the commercial angle has made Diwali so much Christmasy. Big releases on the box-office, flashy discounts and a decreasing essence of a festival. Okay won't dive into that. All India Bakchod did a huge favor by filming Honest Diwali for us last year.

The other thing about Diwali is that it is the only occasion of the year which lets me put my electrical engineering degree to use: by joining a couple series, peeling a few wires and lighting up the place. That too took me some time this year. Self pun.

Will be back. Till then, bye. 

10,000 Hours.

I was going through a book today, and came across this idea propagated by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers that 10.000 hours of practice are sufficient for any individual to attain achieve mastery in any field. I have been stuck with this thought ever since, and I am still not convinced that this thumb rule can be rubbed in every nose. I think I have few valid reasons why I don't agree with the New York Times' best selling author and some research carried out by MIT to support this hypothesis.

Mastery in turn would genuinely mean success, and practically is there a standardized method to measure success? I am not talking about apples and oranges here, i.e., not drawing comparisons between Roger Federer and Lionel Messi. But even if you go for a head to head between any two professionals from same field, mastery or success is still very ambiguous. I am 23, and that amounts for roughly 2,00,000 hours right. So if I have put in 10,000 hours playing cricket, does that make me a tenth as good as Sachin Tendulkar? Or if from now on an average joe like me somehow manage to finish that quota of 10,000 hours, will I be ever as good Sachin? Of thousands of research scholars who are breaking their backs over a laboratory screen, will any of them ever come close to Einstein?

Hence my hypothesis that defining good, better and best in any field is as difficult as finding two identical straws in a haystack. Any success is relative in an absolute sense, and this applies to everything. Comparing two individuals or in-animates comes to us as naturally as breathing; but even if you actually start implementing the "walk in other's shoes" philosophy, even then it makes little or no sense. Why? Because you will always have a certain style of walking which may never be replicated by someone else. Hence a general thumb rule is not universally applicable. 10.000 hours of practice will take you closer to that best but there will always be a missing piece in that jigsaw, talent.

No matter how many hours I put in, 10,000 or 20.000 I will never get close to a Tendulkar or a Messi. or Paul McCartney or Gladwell himself. The reason being that its not just a number that you can crunch and get on with life. There will be a certain natural ability that you will inherit in your genes that will not last beyond a limit. That talent, that precocious instinct is rare and sometimes is once in a generation phenomenon. Hence success cannot be build up using specific ingredients in predefined quantities. And even if it was possible, you'll always need the tadka of talent to spice things up.

Again a parallel thought would be that is success all about talent? Talent will be the driver, yes, but it still needs a vehicle and that is where your practice and hard work will come in. Talent will be there to maybe give you a head start, but for sustained endurance you will always need practice. Without that, your talent, as precocious and as unique it might be, will burn brightly in the start but will eventually wither out. If your talent is your engine, then your practice, 10,000 hours or not, will fuel it. Your natural ability will always have certain limits, but your practice will stretch it to its absolute end. As Edison had once said, success is 99 percent perspiration and 1 percent inspiration, neither alone will suffice the complete set. Hence you need both: natural talent which gives you that instinct and hard work to drive that talent. Wrapping up someone's ability under the header talent does little justice to the hard labor put in by the the individual; so does the label of a hardworking fellow to someone's natural abilities.

No this does not make anything any simpler from now on. Only some food for thought.

The Twenty Something.

Hardly any posts this year and its already June. And for me June means an increment in the age column. The twenty something becomes twenty something plus one.

The twenties are fascinating. You are raw, eager and restless. There is a buzz, a new interest and a new probable course every weekend. You can afford to take risks, with full knowledge of the fact that the end sum maybe zero, or even negative. In spite of what our education system and society feeds us: that excellence from day one is a pre-requirement, it is probably this phase which determines the place and shape in which we land up in the long run.

The question is, are you going to take a leap with a rope tied around your waist, just in case anything goes bad? Yes its perfectly alright to do that, absolutely fine move.

The leap to freedom, or success for that matter, is not about strength or how far you jump. Its about that indomitable human spirit to risk it all. It is not a necessity, you can always play safe. But then you might never come out of that well.

Will be back sooner this time. Bye.

The Ring.

It was a usual late night shift. The cab driver was on his last trip, back to his home. The time ticking on my watch didn't really give me a chance to negotiate the fare. The day was not over yet, in fact it was supposed to be one long session, to bridge into the biggest day of my life. It is a very funny thing isn't it, how one old song playing over the radio can take you back to old times. My thoughts drifted, swaying between those high and low tides, the voices, those pious smells and familiar old faces. The stone steps of Sethani Ghat, the flow of Narmada and a resulting overload of nostalgia.

I scrambled with the keys at first. I have been living in Mumbai for the past five years now, and almost nine months in this flat but none of it resembles like home. The faces move too quickly to get a proper look at. Hence the scramble to identify the right key was almost regular. One leg in and I checked that old phone as usual, and as usual nothing to show for, not even a single ring. An exasperated exhale and dwindling hopes.

I picked the dinner package lying outside my door and was stuffing it down my microwave soon. A quick meal, and the work now began. An interview, "the" interview. The interview I had waited for for the last two years. A shot a glory and a chance to create history; the youngest VP in the history of the company. A bigger place to live in, a down payment of the S Class maybe. The final installments of the ancestral home back in the village to free it from mortgage. The last piece to complete the jigsaw, and the long story which began with swimming across a gorge to attend primary school. But was it that I wanted, in that moment? Knowing everything and everyone it brought together, the darkest corners of my mind were still stuck with something else, with someone else. The old Nokia phone was a testament to that. I still wait for it, to ring.

After all these years, even the gods would have given up. If it had to, it would have buzzed much earlier. But it didn't and the ring meant a tad too much to me. Even as my subsequent smartphones gave my patience a test with dwindling battery levels, it was never low on power. I made sure of the fact that it was always on, with its towers at the mightiest of the scales. It was always there, in that corner, waiting for that ring to come. But it didn't. Roommates and colleagues failed to understand my obsession with it, and I never tried explaining it to them either. It was not that simple, well it is never that simple. It was necessary to start with, a chance that came once in a while. It was ego that took it forward and it was constraints that connected the dots. In the those very darkest corners of my mind, a voice said that it was never going to ring again. The ring which lay for idle all this time. But a voice in the opposite corner said: it just might. And to that I had no counter.

Alas, I winded up that dilemma earlier than usual that day. I had much to prepare for tomorrow. A presentation to give later the same day and packing to be done for next week's trip. The coffee was brewing hot. The news presenter was claiming that their channel had unearthed a new and even bigger scam. Everything was the same, the usual.

And then there was a ring. In fact there were two, both lying next to each other. I froze, caught in the moment. The coffee was now about to spill over. In that dimly lit room, there were two things shining, both wanting to outdo the other. One was my face, lit up like the blazing fire that she wanted me to be; the other that ring which had waited for its owner all this time.

For once, it did ring.