I watch

I've been watching films lately, watching everything around me actually, with an eye that perhaps never existed before. Everything feels different when you don't evade the many layers it might have and create an illusion entirely your own, finding in it a meaning that is so specific to your life and yet seems like it is out there in the open put together perfectly by someone who you don't and may not have any relation to. Its beautiful to let something symbolic remain symbolic and not a means of leading you on to incidents/ parts in your life. Its true nothing really evokes emotion strong enough unless related to something directly affecting your being/ evolving at some stage in life.
The point here being sometimes it helps to just watch, be that silent spectator, without a set of preconcieved notions or expectations. It's perhaps this they meant in all those lessons of objectivity towards being the oh-so- perfect journalist.
In about two days I have watched four absolutely diverse Indian films that take you through a plethora of communities, customs, religious associations and circumstancial concerns.
From Kaya Taran, a film on a Sikh-Catholic conversion during the 84 anti-Sikh riots to a documentary Sole Voice, Soul Voice about the first Rajasthani Manganaik female performer all the way to a documentary about Gulmohar Avenue, a Muslim dominated residential locality commonly called mini-Pakistan in Delhi and a feature Naseem set in the times of the demolition of Babri Masjid. The diversity of the films in itself left me warped and gazing into space for long hours merely trying to recollect all that I saw. There were times when I felt a connection, a deep relation to the movements on the screen which disappeared in a short span the moment my attention shifted to other details that made the words disappear to sound nothing close to understandable, almost inaudible. My mind seemed to be playing tricks with images appearing in flashes to never appear again, and voices, a babble of sorts. The little things I noticed made me laugh to myself, almost giggle loud enough to let the person in the next seat spring up in surprise. Devoid of thought attached to them films are a string of disconnected images that cloud your vision, with subtitles doing the trick with the speed making it feel like one optical illusion after the other.
More often than not I've drawn meaning out of things I have watched, tried to at least, making the visual display fade into nothingness with hours of discussing concepts and forgoing almost everything in filmmaking that comes in the steps to follow.
It's a rare feeling, a rarer chance of it staying, for now everything I watch is giving me a high and beckoning me into a new dimension. I can't help but enter the theatres with child-like excitement and douse myself in cups of coffee as I stare at the screen in complete rapture.