The Medium...

It's been some time, days infact, since i came back after watching the movie Iqbal. And its one film that i believe should be seen by anyone who considers film making to be an art that extends itself as a medium to reach out and touch lives. This film does that. The blogs are full of Salaam Namaste, and with me being stuck in the now coined M(ediocre) B(ut) A(rrogant) schedule of mid-terms, end-terms, project submissions, and my mandatory quota of time spent doing nothing; have not yet managed to squeeze in time to watch the hallowed film. But i think it is films like Iqbal that make a film worth the experience.

I am not here to write an ode to Nagesh Kukunoor, but he is an excellent filmmaker. And has never ceased to amaze me. Watch the little hopes blossom into determination, and watch the humble will overcome the hundreds of sleazy hurdles that the Indian bureacratic system has managed to erect over the years. It is a fantastic story, fantastic with the fantasy that i agree it incorporates. For the Iqbal saga is something straight out of the books, true blue fiction like Howard Roark , or John Galt. But watch the film and you can see, how simply the multiple elements of India can be incorporated in a simple story, all the while keeping its grip on the script.

Way back in 1964, Marshall McLuhan pioneered the thought, The Medium is the Message. And with the blossoming of the electronic media in the current situational scenario, the medium gains importance that it never had garnered before. There was this song Urvashi Urvashi in the film Hum Se Hai Muqabla, released in 1995; and in this seemingly dumb dubbed song, there was a line that went,

"...agar ladki ko andhere mein, aankh maari toh hoga kya?"

I started writing this blog in the belief that blogging has a responsibility, something that is as fuzzy as the much talked about Corporate Social Responsibility. Yet is. With the rapid proliferation blogging has become a new status symbol. There are people creating blogs just for the heck of it. And heck as in pure unadulterated heck. They have pasted their photographs and have posted things like,

"Heyy, this is my pic!"
"I am standing with this and this" et cetera et cetera.

I know i should not be criticizing or putting down anyone. And i amy sem to be arrogant in saying this. But then do we need to have a blog, I want to know why is it being dome? What exactly are they thinking when they create blogs like that? Is it that they want to see their names in google when they search for it (once there was a fad of doing this, it was called something like an ego-search or some other thing like that)? Or is it a symbol of telling "heyy i have a blog"?

This entire business of bogus blogs, sometimes drives me nuts. But then the medium is the message. And its a democratic world. Thankfully there are some gems like Iqbal. And all the bloggers whose written words are a treat in themselves.

Like in Savage Gardens, Crash and Burn video;

Communicate Anyhow...