Of-course, decades ago when I saw the movie Up, Close, and Personal and heard the song "because you loved me" not in my wildest dream I thought it would turn out to be a song for Max who wasn't born at that time.
Every time I hear this song, I cry, I smile, my heart fills with gratitude and how god damn lucky I am to have met and shared 13 years of my life on this planet with Max.
That movie increased my respect for journalism to keep and make the world a better place (and Fox News and co ruined it years later)
Redford is one of my all time favorite actors plus one of my favorite human beings (trust me, it’s not a big list).
When I came to the US in the 90's, like a maniac I watched so many old movies - all movies of Jimmy Stewart, Robert Redford etc. They don't make movies like that anymore. These movies teach about values in life, morals and how to live a good life being a good living being,
Every few years, I rewatch the movie Spy Game. I dunno why I love it, maybe it's because Max and I watched it together when Max was a puppy. The last scene when waves goodbye to the CIA security guard and drives off in his Porsche was so stylish.
Sir, thank you for teaching me your subtle style, your generous heart, and just plain how to be a grounded human being even with all the fame and money.
Max and I thank you for our hearts !
You made a little better human being through your life and movies.
US acting legend Redford, best known for roles in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting, has died at the age of 89.
In a statement, his publicist Cindi Berger, said: "Robert Redford passed away on September 16 at his home at Sundance in the mountains of Utah - the place he loved, surrounded by those he loved. He will be missed greatly. The family requests privacy."
There are hardly any good Indian movies but there are some hidden gems in the form of Hindi series.
A colleague told me about the Paatal Lok series a couple of years ago and I was hooked.
Jaideep Ahlawat as Inspector Hathiram Chaudhary is just brilliant. In the middle crappy actors, Jaideep is an actor who is showered with talent probably from up above.
Jaideep Ahlawat is the Hindi version of what Vijay Sethipathi is to Tamil cinema.
I haven't been to India for almost 2 decades now but through Hathiram's eyes I am discovering not much has changed - poverty, power, and pusillanimous seems persistent.
Thank you sir for making me lost in your art and making me think.
He is an Indian, Rohtak-born. His precinct is Outer Jamuna Paar in Delhi. His currency of operation is that tough, drain-pipe humanity, which he has to preserve in an increasingly murky world.
High-profile police cases that turn out to be zero-sum games are his to negotiate. Slouch-shouldered and pot-bellied, he goes through a series of spirals only to come upon dead ends.
To do this night after night is to earn those bleary, exhausted eyes that are his signature.
Those eyes have wonderful bags under them that touch us deeply.
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We keep persisting with Paatal Lok's hardbound cynicism because we know that even if wiped out and shattered, we can still come home to Hathiram Chaudhary. We are sure he would let us in with a shrug.
He has a political stance; he most certainly does. But he never uses it as a tool to patronize, instruct, or elevate himself to a higher moral plane.
Does this explain his broad appeal, why he's equally beloved by right-wingers and lefties?
Here's Hathiram's version of liberalism, as unrehearsed as they come.
In the first season, while standing up for a Muslim colleague, he doesn't position himself as the progressive one battling a bunch of bigots.
On the contrary, his actions suggest that steering clear of bigotry is something we all can aspire to.
In Season 2, there's a wonderful scene involving the revelation of a close friend's sexuality, where he rebukes his personal brand of Haryanvi machismo as he lends his support to the slightly embarrassed friend.
"I'm a country bumpkin with no knowledge of gay parades. But if it feels right to you, then that's all that matters," so says the bumpkin, not emphatically but searchingly, and with a faint note of some swear-word bubbling up in his throat.
His inclusive attitude is unique: It may not possess the jingle of a placard slogan, but it surely has the warmth of a hardboiled embrace.
You can watch the full documentary online at Christspiracy
From Nazareth to the Vatican and from New Delhi to Kathmandu, the pair questioned world-renowned theologians, Christian farmers, Indigenous shamans, archeologists, and religious leaders and asked them to explain why cruelty to animals is accepted around the world, even though compassion is supposedly the uniting core principle of all world religions.
The historical texts and facts that they found—some hiding in plain sight and some deeply buried—are explosive. The new documentary Christspiracy reveals truths that many lifelong Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, and Buddhists have never heard. For those of us who have felt isolated and confused by seemingly conflicting values, the film offers hope: clear and compelling evidence that great religious leaders absolutely rejected harming and killing animals. This revelation has massive implications for how we conduct our moral lives.
Getting the information wasn’t easy. The filmmakers’ vehicles were chased, their homes were ransacked, and doors were slammed in their faces. Netflix wanted to censor the film. Waters and Andersen refused, and Christspiracy became the first movie ever to have its rights bought back from the world’s largest streaming platform.
Waters was forced out of his congregation after church leaders told him to stop asking questions. And his experience rings familiar to many of us. We’ve been ridiculed for our concern for animals, reprimanded for questioning what we were taught, and mocked for our discomfort at religious gatherings in which animals’ flesh is served. But we stand firm in our belief that violence toward animals is wrong.
Animal testing is the most CRUEL thing in the world. Humans fuck up their lives by drinking, smoking, eating crap, lethargic lifestyle etc., to make their bodies fragile, And to fix it, they use these poor animals to test drugs.
It has been proved over and over again - animal testing and studies on drugs are not good indicators for the drugs effectiveness on humans.
In a nutshell, humans are torturing animals for no use and continue to do so because no one questions.
I am glad this is getting a lot of moral attention now.
The Signal - I loved the unique storyline and final (good) twist.
Humanity needs more stories like this to think beyond self and their families. This quote says it all!
Somethings are bigger than us.
I really don't care how humanity was in the past but we need to learn to sacrifice for things bigger than us. Things that reduce pain and sufferings for all beings and more.
There's nothing new in human experience, Mr. Tully. Each generation thinks it invented debauchery or suffering or rebellion, but man's every impulse and appetite from the disgusting to the sublime is on display right here all around you. So, before you dismiss something as boring or irrelevant, remember, if you truly want to understand the present or yourself, you must begin in the past. You see, history is not simply the study of the past. It is an explanation of the present.
- Paul Hunham
It's been while I laughed every few minutes in a movie!
Paul Giamatti and Co., have delivered an instant classic. This is an insanely great movie; a perfect cocktail of poignancy, comedy, and reality. I miss the Hollywood which made movies like this often.
These days in real life too; they don't make teachers like Paul.
Paul Hunham: You're not your father.
Angus Tully: How do you know?
Paul Hunham: Because no one is his own father. I'm not my dad. No matter how hard he tried to beat that idea into me. I find the world a bitter and complicated place, and it seems to feel the same way about me. I think you and I have this in common. But don't get me wrong, you have your challenges. You're erratic and belligerant and gigantic pain in the balls, but you're not your father. You're your own man. Man, no. You're just a kid. You're just beginning. And you're smart. You've got time to turn things around. Yes, I know that Greeks had the idea that the steps you take to avoid your fate are the very steps that lead you to it, but that's just a literary conceit. In real life, your history does not have to dictate your destiny.
I love Christopher Nolan movies; even during the pandemic I went to see Tenant and was disappointed.
Inception is still my all time favorite Nolan movie.
Oppenheimer's biopic should have limited Nolan style jumping back and forth the time every 30 seconds. This will lose most people's interest since most don't know Oppenheimer's story.
I did love the movie.
Hat's off Oppenheimer for managing some of the brilliant minds of our times in a small space and time and delivering for humanity. No small feat and as far I know - no one before or since has pulled this feat.
Oppenheimer life can teach us few lessons; nothing new but age old wisdom.
1. Watch out for enemies amongst your friends. Pick your friends wisely and don't get disappointed if they disappoint.
2. Choose your spouse and who you have sex with wisely. Nothing more in life is more important than this.
3. Eschew ideology. Never even flirt with one else you will face consequences sooner or later.
4. Understand people don't have gratitude. Learn to accept that as a daily status quo.
5. People have short term memory outside of their "personal" life (which one of the reasons for # 4).
6. Do the right thing always (the atom bomb was the right thing) and pass on to the next generation. There are some unique cases where one cannot be responsible for second or third order effects.
Maybe one day his work might destroy this planet. Maybe not. Maybe his work saved the planet and might save it again.
I have seen the movie a few times and I do remember that quote but yet I realized the profoundness of wisdom in those lines from No Country For Old Man.
In the Coen brothers’ 2007 film No Country for Old Men, the assassin Anton Chigurh asks his fellow hitman Carson Wells before he kills him:
“If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?”
A similar question can be posed to McCarthy’s humanist critics:
if your philosophies have brought the world to its present state, of what value are your philosophies? No amount of thinking and no exercise of will can save the human animal from itself. For the intrepid literary explorer, grace in a human being means living with this truth.
For 13 years of Max's life; I was "convinced" that I gave him the right diet, exercise et al., but yet I was caught with my pants down when he got cancer.
For me only my pants were down but for Max - he had to suffer and watching that killed me. What good were my choices for 13 years if it brought to that moment on December 20th 2019?
I didn't become a nihilist. I understand, I had so much gap in knowledge and for the past four years, I have been trying to fill that gap and act on it so that my choices are mindful when it comes to Fluffy, Garph and Neo.
I will drop every damn tradition, beliefs, rules, and my hardcore values if it is bad and makes no sense to stick to them.
Max was around the same age as Neo is now. It was just Max and I in the midst of the best times of our lives. I saw the first part of Avatar during those times.
James Cameron movies are chick flicks wrapped around a unique brand of education and entertainment. This time empowered with 13 years of ecological knowledge, he sets a new benchmark for himself.
Avatar : The Way Of The Water - Yes, the movie is long, the story is ordinary (because it reality) and VFX is beautiful.
Behind those mundane things if one knows the science behind each scene, there will be no surprises but yet one will appreciate Cameron's innate gift to educate the people through his movies.
1. Beauty of known and mostly unknown ocean life.
2. Beyond beauty and importance of preserving the coral reefs.
3. Cetacean intelligence. In the past decade, there has been so much humbling understanding of intelligence of Whales and Dolphins, Cameron played an important part with his documentary Secrets of the Whales. This movie brings this knowledge to life for the masses.
4. Of course, the villains are humans. It's true on Earth and in Pandora - a metaphor for Earth
5. And much more on the importance of the symbiotic relationship between human animal and all other non-human animals.
Please don't watch this movie passively. Learn from it and follow it in our everyday life.
James Cameron's interview with National Geography:
We live in a shifting baseline, where the ocean as we see it today is not what it once was. The film was also an opportunity to show us what our oceans might have looked like 300, 400, 500 years ago, before we really got busy toward an industrial civilization. If people see this film, and aside from the drama of the Sully family [the film’s protagonists] and the relationships and all these big, dramatic conflicts, if they just love the underwater experience—and they love that sense of the profusion of life and the magic and mystery—then maybe it will reconnect them with what we are presently losing here on this planet.
[---]
They also have a symbiotic culture with an intelligent species of ocean air-breathers: big animals that we would probably take a glance at and say, Oh, that’s a whale. But, of course, it’s not a whale—it’s the Pandora version, which is called a tulkun. The tulkun are actually a very advanced society, even though their advancements are all mental. They have no technology because they have no manipulating hands as we do. They rely on the Na’vi for anything that requires that kind of physical manipulation, but they’re quite advanced mentally: They have complex language, they have mathematics, they have music, and so on.
It was an interesting journey for me to do the National Geographic limited series Secrets of the Whales because that showed that the cetaceans that live here on planet Earth—the real ones—actually have a more advanced culture than we had previously thought, in terms of passing down very structured information from generation to generation. They have complex music that’s adopted by other members of the population of that species, and it travels around the world like a kind of greatest-hits album.
[---]
The reason that I went down the path of making a series of films in the same universe is because I thought that what I needed to say artistically—to communicate with people—I could do within that framework. Obviously, shifting from the rainforest, which was the focus of the first film, to the ocean, [there] is, between the lines, a plea for the protection and conservation and celebration of our oceans. Hopefully we can turn back from a path that is putting the oceans under stress. I don’t even like to use the term “stress”: It’s used a lot in conservation, [but] if you consider fourth-stage cancer “stress,” yeah, it’s “stress.”
The coral reefs will be a thing that exists only in films in 50 to 75 years, in most places around the planet. That’s not okay. When I was a kid, I aspired to become a diver, so I could go and see this wonder and this beauty myself. And then I spent decades exploring and enjoying that world. My kids and my grandchildren won’t be able to do that. And so, it’s kind of a cri de cœur, if you want to put it that way: to remember, to celebrate and fall in love with again, and therefore remember to protect that which we’re losing.
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.
- Margaret Mead
I was 9 years old when India won the world cup in 1983. Everyone in my house were sleeping; I was watching the match with someone who was visiting us. I think he was my mom's relative. That is one of my oldest memories. I don't remember how jubilant I felt that night but there are glimpses of me walking to the refrigerator and drinking ice cold water (which meant I was happy and needed a drink).
That victory changed confidence of Indian people. It was the seed which lead to the growth of Tendulkar in 1990 who single handedly responsible for boasting confidence of India. Timing was impeccable as the economy opened up around the same time. I am pretty sure, this generation doesn't have any idea what it meant and hence, they have no gratitude for what they have now.
I also met Kapil Dev near my house before I moved to US. These two cricketers are great human beings who have a big hand in changing a fate of nation which was stuck in the past even after 4 decades of independence.
The English game of cricket was the biggest catalyst for India to come out of the shadow of English imperialism.
I don't watch cricket anymore nor any other sports. I think, it was very useful tool for me during my younger days. Sports inspired me and I moved on to other things as I grew older. It's pity that most people use it as a passive entertainment and wasting hours everyday sitting in front of the TV. It's worse in US.
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumble puppy.
As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions."
In 1984, Huxley added, "people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us".
This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.
Jersey is a heart warming story. It's inspired from the life of the late cricketer Raman Lamba. I don't remember much about his career but the kid in me was thrilled to see him come out to bat and he was the fittest person in the team.
When I read the review of the movie, I thought it was the story of Robin Singh. But this is a story of thousands of talented Indian cricketers and other sportsmen who lost their dreams because of omnipresent bureaucracy. This hasn't changed even today.
Movies like Jersey are a remainder to younger generation to see the reality as it is, stop using cricket to fuel nationalism, be persistent to fight the system and change it. One can dream.
The song Maiyya Mannu is soothing.
After a long long time, I got to watch not one but two soulful Hindi movies.
I didn't decide to watch Coda because it won the Oscar's this year; I did so for no apparent reason with no idea about the movie.
20 minutes or so into the movie, I realized this was adapted from 1996 Hindi movie Khamoshi: The Musical. Khamoshi was remake of 1996 German movie and in 2014 this was adapted into a French movie and finally, in 2021 Coda.
I haven't even watched Khamoshi (love the songs though) leave alone other German and French ones but Coda was awesome!!
Kids in this country (and most developed and developing countries) live in the Velvet Rut, if it's not already, sooner or later it will be the primal problem for this planet.
Let’s start here: It's not fair for us to ask teenagers to describe their personalities. Teenagers are endearing but ridiculous people who can barely heat up a cup of ramen noodles and whose brains won’t be fully formed for two more presidential terms. Any teenager who is asked to describe themselves and doesn’t say, “I am scared and confused and my hormones have sort of turned me into a werewolf,” is lying.
Obviously, parents are writing many of these essays. The “Varsity Blues” scandal—in which wealthy parents paid big money to a fraudulent admissions scheme—showed how far parents will go to give their kids a leg up. Incredibly, many applications include the pointless step of making students check a box to verify that the application contains their own work, which is a verification system so ineffective that it makes the “I am 18” buttons on adult websites seem like the security at a Swiss bank.
Some parents of means will hire a college admissions essay coach. These services, which commonly cost well north of $100 per hour, typically include glowing testimonials from satisfied parents, such as this one from a mother in Rhode Island:
“Julie helped my daughter take her essay from a disjointed, boring story to an essay with great flow and flair.”
Powerful testimony! Apparently, the initial essay was so bad that even someone with a genetic predisposition towards the author couldn’t hide her disgust. The writing was, it seems, such a disappointment that—judging from the words of the woman who carried the author in her womb for nine months—it made a dirty limerick scrawled in a bathroom stall look like Beowulf. But the author hired an essay coach, and now she goes to Duke! What an outstanding system!
In summary, it's ridiculous to ask the kids to write an essay about their life when most kids live a very similar lives inside their heads, decoupled from realities of life and not fully grown brains.
We live in a world where future citizens have no sense of anti-fragility and their main slogan is "me, me, me" and self train themselves to constantly seek pleasure. From food to technology leave alone developing an innate sense of morality they are inept to the core.
But I am so glad my generalization was wrong. There are outliers kids in this and every other country.
Ruby is one of them - for starters, poor gal she wakes up at 3 am to help her family before going to school. She knows how important is to self sacrifice and living a life beyond the fellow human primates do.
There are some phenomenal kids such as Ruby who take responsibilities for their families at a tender age (I am talking below 10 years) and develop maturity which most 40 year old men don't have.
I salute all those kids. Maybe, this beautiful blue planet still has hopes for humanity.
Please watch Coda. Teach your kids to be like Ruby. Learn to appreciate what you have in life. Be responsible. Get the hell of yours and your kids velvet rut.
The less we are convinced of our exceptionalism, the greater ability we have to understand and contribute to our environment, the less blindly driven we are by our own needs, the more clearly we can appreciate the needs of those around us, the more we can appreciate the larger ecosystem of which we are a part.
Peace is when we realize that victory and defeat are almost identical spots on one long spectrum.
Peace is what allows us to take joy in the success of others and to let them take joy in our own.
Peace is what motivates a person to be good, to treat every other living thing well, because they understand that it is a way to treat themselves well.
We are one big collective organism engaged in one endless project together. We are one.
We are the same.
Still, too often we forget it, and we forget ourselves in the process.
I stopped traveling because I couldn't spend a day without Max. So we never flew except spending occasional days in the wilderness alone with Max and serenity - which lead having our own Walden in the wilderness which Max would have adored!
My despise for travel has now, turned into hatred. In the past 2 decades "travel" has become a fad. It has risen to moronic levels that people work 80 hours a weeks to save dollars to spend few mind numbing days taking selfies for the sole reason of signaling. They are not screwing themselves but screwing the entire ecology and cause animal suffering (think bullfighting in Spain).
A new documentary, aptly titled The Last Tourist came a decade too late but still never too late.
This film is a wake-up call.
We need to dramatically rethink the way we travel.
In 1950, there were 25 million international tourist arrivals. In 2020, that number was expected to be 1.6 billion. That means more people traveling than at any other point in history.
Travel is in an unfortunate state – and that’s even before COVID-19 brought it to a temporary standstill. Overtourism magnified the increasing impact on the environment, wildlife, and vulnerable populations around the world. Unintentionally, tourists have been destroying the very things they have come to see. Tourism reached a tipping point.
Yet, travel is also an opportunity. It can be leveraged as a force for good – to promote conservation, alleviate poverty, and positively transform the lives of people living in host communities, while fostering cultural connection and understanding between people from all walks of life. Tourism can spread peace and be the greatest form of wealth distribution the world has ever seen. This forced pause has presented us with the opportunity to reshape the travel industry as we know it.
This poignant film explores our ability to harness tourism’s power in a way that creates shared value for all – travellers and host communities alike – while preserving the places and natural resources we treasure most.
Change starts with us.
The one thing you can't escape in your life is yourself.
A plan ticket or a pill or some plant medicine is a treadmill, not a shortcut. What you seek will come if you sit and do work, if you probe yourself with real self-awareness and patience.
The next time we feel the urge to flee, to hit the road or bury ourselves in work or activity, we need to catch ourselves. Don't book a cross-country flight - go for a walk instead. Don't get high - get some solitude, find some quiet. There are far easier, far more accessible, and ultimately far more sustainable strategies for accessing the stillness we were born with. Travel inside your heart and your mind, and let the body stay put.
“The hegemony of America in the community of the free world creates some curious moral hazards. We are ironically held responsible for disparities in wealth and well-being which are chiefly due to differences in standards of productivity. But they lend themselves with a remarkable degree of plausibility to the Marxist indictment, which attributes all such differences to exploitation. Thus, every effort we make to prove the virtue of our “way of life” by calling attention to our prosperity is used by our enemies and detractors as proof of our guilt. Our experience of an ironic guilt when we pretend to be innocent is thus balanced by the irony of an alleged guilt when we are comparatively innocent.”
Watch this documentary, pause and reflect for a moment - understand how much suffering you are unleashing just for the sake of your gastro intestinal pleasures...
Complexity science does study something distinctive - namely the emergent features of systems that are composed of a lot of components that interact repeatedly in a disordered way. The reason why it has been hard to identify what is distinctive about complex systems is that there are many different kinds of emergent properties and products of complex systems, and they are not all found in all complex systems. The common features of complex systems manifest themselves differently in different kinds of systems.
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There are many important theoretical questions on which complexity science bears, the most obvious ones concerned with relationships between life and nonliving matter, and between conscious and non-conscious matter. The general implication of our analysis for these matters is that the dichotomy between atoms and molecules and advanced life forms is a very crude way of seeing the many layers of structure that are found at different scales. The only way to understand the emergence of life is by studying the processes that occur in self-organizing physical systems not just physical structures.
Once the complexity of nonliving systems, such as the solar system and the Earth and its climate, is grasped in detail, the difference between life and non-life seems to be less of a mysterious leap and more of a continuum.
Don't Look Up!! That's the name of the new Netflix movie.
This is a landmark movie for Netflix not only because of so many popular stars but mainly because of its brilliant screen play. Watching the movie was like reading a new Michael Lewis book - funny, crazy sapiens, scary, greed, underdogs, and unbelievable stupidly.
This movie covers all the standard villains from this blog - money, greed, self centeredness, politics, technology, social media, news, talk show hosts, ivy league bullshit echo chamber education, silicon valley saviors and obsession with space and no respect for this blue planet called home.
And of course never knowing anything about complex systems leave alone comprehending complex systems.
Leonard DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence rock! This is now one of my all time favorite movie.
Kate Dibiasky: We have exactly six months, ten days, two hours, 11 minutes and 41 seconds, until a comet twice the size of Chicxulub tears through our atmosphere and extincts all life on Earth.
Dr. Randall Mindy: When did you do those calculations?
Kate Dibiasky: I put the moment of impact on a diet app. So, impact is when my diet ends. Only I'm not on a diet. I'm just crying five times a day.
