THE INDIAN COMMENTATOR

“It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us.” __Dr. Viktor E. Frankl ( Man’s Search for Meaning )   Image Courtesy: Google In Man’s Search For Meaning Dr. Viktor E. Frankl introduces his psychotherapeutic idea ‘Logotherapy’ and the events and revelations that led him into the practical realization of his hypotheses. The book has three parts: Part One: Experiences in a concentration camp; Part Two: Logotheraphy in a nutshell; and Postscript: The case for a tragic optimism. The book is graced by a wonderful preface by Harold S. Kushner , in which he contextualizes the book for general readers. As Dr. Frankl himself asserts repeatedly, this book is limited in its space and possibility to include the complete scholarship of Logotherapy. Instead, one should look at Man’s Search for Meaning as an attempt to elucidate what is concisely expressed in the subheading: “The classic tribute to hope from the holocaust”. Part One...

Is it Shakespeare who asked:- “What's in a name? that which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet.”? Let me think. Yes indeed, in his everlasting love story, Romeo and Juliet . Image Courtesy:sports.ndtv.com Before 1994, Sachin was a rare name in Kerala. It’s a north Indian name, and Keralites did not prefer trying it, ever before. Then something happened. The year between 1994 and 2000 coincided with the rise of a new religion in India, the land of all religions. Much like any other religion, there was a central god figure to this one too. They called this new religion, Cricket, and named their god Sachin. Image Courtesy: Google Indian culture has never been reluctant to worship human idols. Some critics have dubbed it a profitable industry, and some others a fraud. Every epithet appeared pale in the affinity a vast majority of people exhibited towards these human-gods. God-men and God-women even turned to become political kingmakers. Sa...

Some of you might have gone through my recent post titled ‘What’s Meaningful For You?’ . This was a short fiction in my attempt to extrapolate the significance of the few lines that struck me from the book Man’s Search for Meaning . Now I realize, there was more to it. It was not just about the meaning of a symbolic dream, but also about a strong enemy that often does some good to us all--fear.   Fear seems to be the most primitive of human emotions, which often works as an alarm bell and releases various signals through hormones in human body thus influencing mind to take the best suited decision at the time of need. Fear, however has a very deep cultural meaning as well. This emotion signifies the inability to be in control of a certain occasion or the failure in keeping one’s nerves calm when met with adversity. As a result the coward flees from the war zone. Many a passages from holy texts of religions as well as ideologies proclaim it best to be full of courage. “S...

In the past they said, the internet would overthrow books, newspapers, print magazines and printed textbooks and as a corollary, the publishing industry itself. Fact remains that matters are different now. I remember, still, as a child I was fascinated by the talk about computers that textbooks would be replaced by something like slates, with glossy screens—like ipads, but hell, back in the 90s, there were no ipads in real life. What would happen to newspapers and magazines? We speculated. Who cared about newspapers and magazines? However, books were my weakness. I could not think, books being replaced by some solid, granite like glossy plastic and glass.   They were matters of science fiction. In school, our textbooks always took the form of glossy slates, when we talked about computers. Then when the new millennium came, when there was a rage about the end of the world and all, computers came to India. Image Courtesy: Google At first, some of us thought of what m...

Note: I have a major case of arachnophobia. The intuition was strong. In fact, the strength of my intuition was strong enough to wake me up from a startlingly clear dream I had so early in a morning, on a Wednesday. The Intuition was that there was something to this dream beyond the spiders I saw all over my body. The fear and aversion that I felt at the feel of spiders, already covering my face, and hands, and coming after me in a race of unsatiated hunger to terrify, to conquer me in my sleep, was at its peak, when the intuition hit me. There must be something to this, I heard myself think. I almost woke up, opened my eyes to the mild light of the early morning sun, and tried to make myself believe that it was all a dream-- just a dream . Image Courtesy: Google I felt a wriggling sensation on my right hand. I shook the hand violently. The cover fell to the ground. The cover was my fortress inside the darkness of dizzying impenetrable embrace of sleep. The spiders,...

1st among the movies about writers that Impressed me.  Capote “It's the hardest when someone has a notion about you and it's impossible to convince them otherwise.”—Truman Capote in Capote (film 2005) Image Courtesy: Google Thanks to one of my old friends, she gave me this DVD with some movies eloquently lavish on artistic material and inspiring story telling techniques. One among them was Capote . Directed by Bennett Miller, and released in 2005, Capote is biographically inclined to the life of the man who wrote the first nonfiction novel—Truman Capote. Truman Streckfus Persons, aka Truman Capote lived from 1924 September 30 to 1984 August 25. Although he had written fiction, including plays, his grit came out to its true colors with In Cold Blood (1966). He addresses this book as the first “nonfiction novel” in the movie, Capote . The movie is based on Gerald Clarke's book, Capote, the biography of Truman Capote .   Image Courtesy: Google Philip ...

And the 2nd place goes to…   Becoming Jane “As if the writing of women did not display the greatest powers of mind, knowledge of human nature, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour and the best-chosen language imaginable?” _Jane Austin in Becoming Jane (2007) Even if you haven’t read any of Jane Austen’s books, Becoming Jane will be entertaining. Becoming Jane is a British-Irish film with beautiful locations and wonderful rhyming British accent. Of course, you can call this “colonial nostalgia”, or whatever your professors taught you at the university. However, the attraction the setting held out for me was immense. Along with the storyline, the background of the charming countryside was speaking uninhibited on matters of heart and mind in this 18 th century woman writer’s life. Image Courtesy: Anne Hathaway Jane, the younger daughter of Reverend George Austen and his wife, aspires to become a writer, and in family gatherings, she prides herself in read...

3 rd among 3 Movies on Writers that Impressed Me.       Image Courtesy: Stephen King.com Stuck in Love   Bill Borgens, a successful novelist is unable to move on after divorce with Erica, his wife. Bill Borgens son, Rusty is seventeen years old, and is in a serious lack of romantic enlightenment. Bill’s daughter Sam (19 years) is, on the other hand, an emotionally matured writer, on her way to big success. She despises her mother, for leaving her alone as a child to find another man. Stuck in Love is a romantic drama directed by Josh Boone, and released in 2013, with these three people—Bill, Rusty, and Sam—struggling to find peace with their relationships. Image Courtesy: Google Sam publishes her first book, the one that her father, a successful writer, did not even see her writing let along help her edit. This creates a conflict between the father and daughter in the beginning, but is settled later, when the book receives lavish reviews from ...

For the next three days, I will be reviewing three of the most impressive movies I watched, 3 Movies on Writers that Impressed Me. The categorization, however, is based on the subject matter—writers. Being a professional in this area, the subject is of undeniable interest to me. I can connect deep skin with the characters and their feelings when someone says, “I sold my first story, today!”   Image Courtesy: Google The third movie I would talk about is not based on true events, unlike the other two movies. One of the movies, I reviewed had already appeared in TIC Saturday Flicks . This is the second movie in the “ 3 Movies on Writers that Impressed Me.”   The criteria for selecting each of these movies are kept as simpler as possible: personal taste . How else can one demonstrate those matters that defy all possible rational explanations and are reluctant to fall into the territory of the supernatural, at the same time? I still do not know, what instilled in...