Carpe Diem!

These days I love Americans, at least to the extent of their way of living. Their foreign policy etc., does detract but the way they love themselves is quite beautiful.

Indians make movies with such speed in the works. They try to cram in more and more data into that same small space. Americans take a smaller, simpler concept and handle it at such leisure.

Their points are subtly made, their dialogues are unhurried and never followed by the "did you get it? did you get it?" anxiety. Even their camera moves slowly.



Bollywood took this fantastic movie, "Dead Poet's Society", added that "romantic" touch to it, which pervades the entire Indian film industry like the smell of a silent fart, threw in a few forgettable songs and named it "Mohabbatein" a.k.a "Gurukul ki bhootni" (attributed to Ms Aishwarya "World" Rai's gho(a)stly appearance).



And the concepts they pick are also so much cleaner and simpler. No unnecessary addition of characters to sell the movie, no juvenile comedy to pull in the crowds. A movie is made for the movies sake. I suppose they do have their set of commercial pot boilers, but those are just what their name implies, "pot boilers" made solely for the purpose of keeping the makers' pots boiling on their stoves.

In India, I guess we're still too poor a country to allow filmmakers the freedom to enjoy their work.

Or software engineers to enjoy theirs.

We must keep the pots boiling. This fear of starvation seems to be killing quality everywhere. People work in some kind of stupor. Religion is the opiate of the masses and our fundamentally socialist nature, combined with the capitalistic tilt of the world, has made money our god.

We work in a religious fervor, trying to please the money god, hoping that he will heap his blessings upon us so that we may eat one more time at that new McDonalds opened across the road.

What we buy with that money is another story. More often than not, it's acceptance. We hope that our general affluence will buy us that square inch of space on the montage of life.

And here this guy says, "Walk at your own pace"

Our own pace is non existent. We move like sheep.

"Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, took the one less traveled by"

If I can say that at any point in my life, I'll be happy.

I don't want to earn money for the rest of my life. I don't want to worship money like a god. I want money to be my slave, my tool.

I want to teach. I want to write. But I don't want some snotty administrative jerk to come and tell me how to teach. I don't want teaching to ever provide my daily bread.

I don't want to write what publishers tell me to. I want to write what I wish to write, and if anyone is interested they can read it. I don't want to write pot boilers. I don't want to teach kids to keep pots boiling.