The Persistence of Memory by Dali - A modern take

 

I have always been a huge fan of Dali and surprisingly, never reproduced any of his works even for a hobby. This Sunday I thought of giving it a shot and re-imagined Dali's "The Persistence of Memory" with a more modern approach. With just a simple change of replacing the wavy clocks by mobile phones, it correlates both the title of the piece with the modern style of living. The Mobile phone is something we are keeping in our daily lives and involuntarily has become our "persistence of memory" our lives.

The size of the piece is 8"x8" and has been made in water colors (Camel + Ladoga)

पुरुष - A Hindi poem on Men for International Men's Day

Image created by Bing AI

मेहनत जिसकी रीड की हड्डी, धैर्य जिसका बल,

कर्म की पथ पर चलता वो है पुरुष अचल ।

अपने लक्ष्य को भेदना, अर्जुन से है सीखा,

पर उसके मन की वेदना का सार किसी ने न देखा ।।

एक तुला के कांटे के सामान,

करता है वो परिवार का संतुलन।

अपनी आशा, आकांशा और सपने का त्याग कर,

करता है वो समाज की तपिश का आलिंगन ।।

एक बेटा, एक पुत्र, एक भाई,

यही नहीं, वो है एक आज्ञाकारी जमाई ।

दिन, रात, महीने और साल गुजर गए,

पुरुष खड़ा रहा, और समय के दूत चुपके से निकल गए ।।

वो सोचता रहा की उसकी अर्धांगिनी कभी तो पारवती बनेगी,

पर आधुनिक काल में केवल काली की छवि रहेगी ।

ऐ पुरुष, तू शिव की तरह हलाहल का पान कर,

संघर्ष क्षणिक है, अपने कर्म से मानवता को प्रणाम कर ।।

आनंद बोड़ा

Surrender

This poem is written on the context that Lord Shiva gets impressed by the incessant focus and hard work of a very knowledgeable and scientific man and gives him Darshan in his dream.

Fig: Meditating Shiva created by Bing AI (Prompt: create a meditating image of Hindu god Shiva on mount kailash. His disciples are saints, monsters, bulls and common people. They are in a worshipping pose towards him. Shiva is in a meditating state.)

My curiosity and the will to know,
Made me question, reason and question the flow.
Driven by logic, I debate with the divine;
He answers patiently just before 03:59.

Oh! I find him calm, serene and yogic,

His aura is beyond human logic,

I have my doubts and knowledge clouts my mind;

I ask him, where do you live and how do I find?

Giving me a look of aplomb;

While his devotees prop out of a catacomb,

He tells me gently, "I will answer your questions."

Suddenly, my heart is filled with mixed emotions.

He returns to a meditating state -

I don't know, why it feels he has no date.

He opened his eyes and spoke, "OM" -

My mind got inundated with pathway to freedom.

The voice trickled down my spine;

Healing my nerves, blood vessels and the dynastic line.

The answers have come, I don't need to ask;

I surrender, Sensei - unto you, I bask and task.

Anand Bora

5 easy ways to shed weight | Bi(e)tter Health tip

The big con about working in software is that this is a ‘s(h)itting’ job and we attract fats very quickly into our bodies. I fell to the gluttony trap and sedentary lifestyle and started feeling very heavy and dull. I was consuming lots of sugar which made me more inactive and lazy. Once I was not able to get down and touch my feet which triggered that I needed to do something about my body. Following is my before / after photo in which I had lost 16 kgs in 6 months. I talk about my process and tips I followed to be where I was in 5 steps.

Me Before / After

QUIT SUGAR

I quit Sugar for more than a year completely. I didn’t take an iota of sugar in my body in any way. No chocolate, no sweets, no cakes and not even home-made sweets. If I really got a craving, I would eat organic jaggery in my tea or anything else.

WORKOUT

I started to workout daily for at least 20 minutes. This automatically increased and I started doing more and more exercises on my own. Probably this is a mental thing and the body becomes accustomed to it as the time goes by. By the 5th month, I was doing 150 crunches a day which was uncalled for at my age of 38. We need to do reasonable exercises daily to feel good in some way. You can follow this app which is great in terms of giving balanced exercise experience.

DAILY CONSUMPTION OF HEALTH DRINK

Drinking a homemade health drink in the morning in an empty stomach eases out the metabolism. I didn’t believe this much before I started. I prepared this drink based on this Youtube tutorial and was consuming it everyday without fail. It really did wonders and I started to see the effect as time went by.

Preparation - Grind some fennel seeds, carom seeds, cumin seeds, flax seeds and some cinnamon and create a rough textured powder.

Consumption - Mix one teaspoon of powder in hot water and a little bit of lemon juice. Drink on an empty stomach to see the difference in a few days.

INTERMITTENT FASTING & DIET

I completely stopped eating at night. My schedule was to eat between 10am - 7pm. I stopped munching unnecessarily and resorted to eating less. Although my diet didn’t change much, I had completely stopped eating RICE. I was eating a lot of pulses, millets and fruits to compensate.

IMPROVED SLEEP SCHEDULE

For us software folks, it is very difficult to manage sleep. We work with people in different time zones and it becomes really difficult to avoid work at night. But when you have to lose weight, you need to tune your body for enough sleep. My sleep schedule changed to 11pm - 5am. I had never done this ever during my working career and it was a drastic change but I started feeling so much better. Although the change was disruptive, it helped me a lot.

So, those were the tips I used to shed my fat. I hope this helps people who are trying to do so and achieve results in due course.

Review of "Hereditary"

Hereditary comes across a movie which should be on your list if you are a Horror movie lover. I am writing this piece so you know already that I love horror movies a lot. To put into perspective, I have already watched 55 from Top 100 horror movies list from IMDB which would be close to 5500 hours of my life. 😀

Getting back to the movie, I watched this 2018 movie on Prime Video recently and it was really good in terms of concealing the antagonist or the demon in this case. Just after finishing the movie, I felt that I had watched an amalgamation of the “Wicker Man”, The Holy Mountain and a tincture of “The Shining”. If you read about those movies or watch them, you will realise what I am talking about.

I want to talk about the BEST parts in the movie which are really good and worth mentioning.

The SOUND DESIGN - Oh! I love the Sound Design in this movie. Very few horror movies bring out the right music to compliment the scenes of the movies. Lewis Goldstein and Tom Ryan have done a splendid job on this project. The sound design is eerie, contemporary, tribal and creepy, all at the same time. I really enjoyed it on the IEMs I used to watch the movie.

The SCRIPT - A very novel approach to horror movie making by mixing a lot of ingredients like paganism, slasher effects, brute force and dreams/nightmares. The unpredictability of people being killed is an icing on the cake and adds a modern and novel approach. There are occasions where the script brings out the emotional part of the characters within a family in a brutal way which is justified by the actors with all its merit. Bonus points on the miniature art concept and connecting it to real life. A scene which shows how the mother laments the death of her child by re-creating the miniature version of her accident, must be a brain child of a genius and vastly experienced writer. The suspense of hiding the main antagonist is also brilliant and the scriptwriter has done a tremendous job here.

The ACTING - All the Actors are Fantabulous. I think this is the first movie of Toni Collette which I have seen and I am already a Fan. She delivers emotions on the screen like a rainbow formed with mercury, transitioning effortlessly from one emotion to the other. Gabriel Brianne and Alex Wolf have been tremendous. This movie must have re-defined Alex’s career and he is on his way to do much larger projects. But one actor whose name I don’t know creates an impact in just one scene with his gaze (pictured below). Although, he comes for another single scene later in the movie too.

The EDITING, COLOR GRADING, SFX and all major aspects of filmmaking are top notch. They keep the audience hooked with the streamlined storytelling.

Needless to say, there are blips which they should have looked at. The VFX at places seems very outdated. For example, the scene when Annie’s jacket catches fire, the fire seems fake to normal eyes. Some decapitation scenes and bodies look glaringly artificial. Color grading at some places during the climax is too dark. They show a lot of symbols in the movie but there is almost no explanation of them. They seem purely referential which in a way shows that the director wants people to make assumptions. They don’t mention how the actual possession happened, only the means are shown. Probably, that can be an inspiration for another movie 😀

Overall, I really enjoyed the movie and it is definitely part of my all time horror movies to watch out for. After the movie, I tried to recall which movie might have been the creepiest I saw and the immediate answer was “Rosemary’s Baby”. Again, that is purely a personal choice and it won’t be fair to limit my answer to just one movie.

"Killer Soup" Review

Image Source : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_Soup

"It is a tale, told by an idiot, full of sounds and fury, signifying nothing." That's how the whole series ends.

How many times has a director been honest in summing up a story in one line at the end of the story. This is one such instance with the director feeding up a coagulated plot to the audience and summarizing the pain to the audience at the culmination of the story.

This review will be short and would save you the pain of dangling between ill placed cuss words and predictable sub plots which have been given the shape of accidents rather than intended homicide.

I was really disappointed with the plot and probably the writing. I have huge respect for people who write screenplay and stories and this in no way demeans the effort of writers of this one too. But I felt, that there has been a lot of patchwork in this story.  Good editing has been able to streamline the story and bring some sense but overall the audience feels like they have landed in no man's land.

The performance of all the actors is really good (of course they are very good professionals) but the real let down happens on the writing part.

**SPOILERS AHEAD**

I mean one of the protagonists, Prabhakar, died in the initial part of the story and is replaced by an impostor and none of his near and dear ones have an inkling that he is not the same guy. NOT EVEN ONE. Really? Although I am not a professional writer but I feel that for a thriller to work well, the sense of doubt and confusion is the biggest weapon. One of the old Hindi movies, Baazigar, camouflaged it very well and had that tincture of confusion all the time. Although the audience knew the culprit but the story still kept the audience engaged and hooked.

The role of Arvind Shetty played by Sayaji Shinde looked all the over the place. I really couldn't make any sense of it. A dominant businessman in whole of Tamil Nadu doesn't seems dominating enough. There are not enough extras around him to show his power and his appearances felt very weak. His last words while dying is a WTF moment and is a testimony of the weak writing. Probably, this character is the weakest character and should have been used more aptly.

This series feels like it belongs to Konkana Sen. Heavily dominated by her presence and the story revolves around her character in many ways. But her character is confusing as well. She has a dream of getting her own restaurant and to get that she involves herself in multiple murders and insane situations. Her character is really mean and bitchy and reminds me of Lena Headley's performance in GoT. Sometimes I felt she is like the shrewd Mom in Law from yester years who would go to any length to torture the daughter in laws. A completely non-compromising selfish antagonist vouching for a dream and cooking "Paya killer soup" for all and sundry.

I dunno what to say about Inspector Hassan's character played by Nasser. An investigation officer who is laid back to start with but becomes curious in a case after the loss of a bright officer in the case. He hallucinates all the time about the officer giving him clues every now and then. A great addition to the plot would have been that Hassan was always high on mushrooms. Would have been logical and creatively connected to the plot too.

There are many many bloopers and everything doesn't add up to be a cohesive plot. I am sure the writing would have been reviewed by so many people and many stalwarts but I don't know how people were convinced on the same.

But I really liked the technicalities and performances. Almost everyone has justified their part and nothing more can be asked from the BTS team as well.

Two standout creative approaches in the series has been -

1. Intermingling of Tamil and Hindi languages and trying to bridge the divide. Perhaps, a series gives more opportunities to do the same and cater to larger audience.  But this is important and really helps in improving and tailoring the minds of people watching the series.

2. The hallucinating character of Inspector Thuppali with a raincoat and persistent rainfall on him. A very creative approach to show how manifestations stick to people's mind in a particular way.

All in all, I really wanted to SOUP to play a more dominant role. Soup seems more notional and points to the "RAITA" in the family and of course the PLOT. The main character, SOUP, should have had more part to play but keeps begging for its place. As per the series, it is definitely DARK but not sure about COMEDY.

PS: This is just a small review of this series I saw. This is completely my independent opinion and outpour on the series. I really respect the effort people put in creating their vision into reality. I apologize if anything in this review causes concern or demeans anyone.

I wrote this small comment on Manoj Bajpayee sir's instagram as a very short review to bring out the comedy in the soup.