this post happened because i have lots of time to stare at movie posters

this post touched a nerve, mostly because i was thinking a very similar thought this morning, so this had the sound of a reply. i'm finding it difficult to find precise words for what i'm trying to say, but what it works out to is that looking around, i think that hindi films are no longer made for a common audience. there are the movies that could not hope to succeed in the heartland, and there are the others, that are made to be crowd-pleasers. what i take this to mean is that there's a loss of cultural common ground, and that's rather sad. what it means is that there are no longer lines like "arre o samba" and the like, that would be instantly recognisable to most indians who speak hindi, regardless of where he/she's from or how urbanised he/she is. that just can't be, any more. and i wondered if that's the reason why there aren't any "great" hindi movies any more (i can't think of few that would be watched twenty years from now).

there are of course the usual arguments about liberalisation and the split-down-the-middle that the intelligentsia claims to haunt india (i could segue off to naxalism from here, but i won't) but in human terms, i wonder if this absence of common cinema would mean that we understand each other less well than we used to: becasue our idiom, our cultural references, are now so different.
and extrapolating, does this mean that other languages, where the differences between the arty and the crowd-pleaser aren't so huge, are the people also bound to be more alike? are they likely to produce better cinema?

talking to the shrink-free.

this afternoon, between conversations on how to make a seminar and hrishikesh mukherji movies (it's a long ride from gzb to delhi... what can i say), the person i was talking to, started up on how being a psychiatrist makes u a poor conversationalist. what he said, was something that i'm currently a little touchy about, for disparate reasons, and it's not something that i expected, somehow, that someone else would point out. that it's a common affliction of psychiatry students, is something of a relief.

basically, what my co-jr said was that he finds himself boring his non-psychiatrist friends with conversation on topics that only psychiatrists would be interested in. that quirks in people around suddenly become worthy of note, and lead to expositions on whys and wherefores. and how this is something he's noticed that other people, including other doctors, don't do: that their occupations don't involve them or make them as incompetent at normal conversation, as ours does. everything seems relevant, and we tend to ask too many questions. all of which is true, and i guess it's the form of third year syndrome that affects psychiatry residents everywhere. it's not that everything becomes abnormal, merely that everything becomes interesting. which is probably worse. :-).

what bothers me about this, more than anything else, apart from the fact that it makes an unusually boring and self-involved person, is that this sort of thing must be obvious to everyone around (last week, someone asked me if i'm ever off work... :-/). and therefore, i'm starting to wonder if any future expression of concern on my part would be interpreted not as friendship, but clinical acumen. and that, therefore, everything that follows becomes slightly forced and manipulative. which is not the relationship i would like to have with people outside the workplace. but i guess, if wishes were horses.....


ps: the reason i'd decided not to continue with this blog is that i was sick and tired of writing an online journal, with silly trivia about myself. this probably qualifies for all those labels, but i'd like people to hold down this thought when communicating with me. so this post probably belongs where the statutory warning is meant to go... :-/.