Message in a Bottle (Lite)

Vaazhkaingardhu soda bottle maadhiri,
Pagaloda mudivu dhaan raathiri.
Pondaatti pera modhalla sollardhudhaan purushalakshanam,
Indo-US nuclear agreement dhaan Manmohan Singhukku sigaram.

Life is like a soda container,
Night is the day's terminator.
Mentioning the wife's name first is the quality in a husband best.
The Indo-US nuclear deal is Manmohan Singh's Everest.

Deep stuff!

We live in such a confused modern world that we search for meaning in all things under the sun. One wonders who's behind the ten rupee hike in the price of onions and what they're upto this time. If a child is born unexpectedly, then it must surely have been a Dan Brown like plot by someone high up in the Catholic Church to sabotage the condom industry. Or worse still, God's way of telling us that the Kali Yuga is going to end all life by bringing in more and more. With your fan going on a hot day, and the other side of the pillow cooler, wouldn't you wonder if it would have been the other way round if the whole world turned the other way? Maybe Katrina wouldn't have happened, because the cyclone would have spun the other way and gone away? As Hercule Poirot would say, what we need in all this confusion is "order and method."

Yep, order and method. So we have movies like The Dark Knight and Indian and Dhrokhal and Varumayin Niram Sivappu made from time to time. These clear the cobwebs and put us back on the path of the most important issue... the search for inner truth. But what about those who don't believe in the inner truth? Or have gone past it? Or have simply decided its boring or useless and put it away, like a nice thick nine-hundred and seventy four page book on the philosophical musings of Pliny the Younger? For these people, the pudhu kavidhai (new-age poem) need not be logical. Or, it might be an algorithm for life, the universe and everything. So, either these guys simply don't care, or have gone so far beyond the meaning of forty two (which, if you don't know by now, is the answer to life, the universe and everything). For this club, there are guys in Tamil Cinema today. CS Amudhan, Venkat Prabhu, Pushkar and Gayathri, and to a lesser extent, TP Gajendran. Why him? He made Maganey En Marumagane, a shameless throwback to the 80s familial problems diatribe formula. But remember, he also made Budget Padhmanabhan, and Middle Class Madhavan, two forward looking gems like the Chennai 28s, Oram Pos and Tamil Padams.

The Western film industry has been miles ahead of the Indian film industry for several decades now. Stoner comedies such as the unforgettable 1974's Dark Star, cult favorites like 2004's Napoleon Dynamite, and just plain weirdos like 2007's Hot Fuzz have always cropped up amidst the more serious stuff. But Tamil Cinema has been giving us the "right stuff" with Vaanchinaathan, Narashimha, Veerasamy, 6'2" and Englishkaaran. With all the really cool philosophical ideas like zero gravity and faster-than-bullet travel exhausted, we've started seeing a new kind of cinema. Its like finding freshness in MF Hussain's stick men and nude women after years and years and years of Picasso's cubes and Dali's clocks (actually that one is really weird). Yeah, right! Ofcourse I'm being sarcastic. All Mother India taught us was that MF Hussain has a deep seated Freudian obsession with the female form, and all Gajagamini showed us was that brightly colored water probably has Azo dyes and Benzene. Don't drink from that river!

No, the new lineup of movies, Oram Po, Chennai 28, Saroja, Goa, Tamil Padam, Boss Engira Baskaran and Va Quarter Cutting teach us something more. They take us someplace away from having to sit through serious attempts at philosophical exposition or action explosion all the time. These new movies, and the kind of English ones I mentioned before tell us something that even proper "comedy" flicks don't. They tell us that life need not always have meaning. They tell us that not every moment has to have gravitas. They tell us that every though need not be analyzed, every expression studied, and every action scrutinized. More than telling us to laugh, they tell us that you can take yourself lightly from time to time. You can enjoy yourself a little bit more by losing yourself in the moment, not by getting lost in it. And that sometimes, a new-age poem may rhyme, but be meaningless. After all, what has the Honorable Dr. Manmohan Singh got to do with the Luni-Solar cycle, or soda bottles with marriage, eh?

P.S.: I've been told by many that my original post was too difficult to read or make sense of, and that I should simplify it. Hope this is more readable if you didn't enjoy the first one.