Tag: spaghetti westerns

Shared passions

It is said that couples who share a number of passions are closer. The corollary is that one way of getting closer as a couple is to develop shared passions. However, things aren’t so easy.

Sometimes it can so happen that one partner is a “leader” when it comes to the hobby while the other is a “follower”, and that can ruin some dynamics. Let me explain. Among other things, I’m passionate about spaghetti westerns and Liverpool FC. Pinky is passionate about chick flicks, theatre,  “Full House” and “How I met your mother”. We’ve both independently tried getting the other interested in our respective passions. I’ve watched a number of chick flicks, liked a few of them, but not so much to develop a passion for the genre. Pinky has watched some Liverpool games, but her fundamental dislike for sport-watching makes it hard for her to develop it as a passion.

We’ve tried hard, both to convince the spouse to take up our respective passions, and to get ourselves to get interested in the spouse’s passion. Sadly, things haven’t worked out as well as we’d thought. It’s been hard on both of us. Like today I fidgeted through an hour of a 90s Kannada comedy before declaring (rather rudely) that I was getting bored. Watching me fidget, I’m sure, would have made Pinky uncomfortable, and feel a sense of responsibility.

Such asymmetric passions can cause grief for both the “leader” and the “follower”. The follower tries hard to “fit in”, while the leader tries hard to make sure the follower is fitting in. The dynamics thus created can ruin whatever positive energy a shared passion can create.

All is not lost, though. I only talked about asymmetric passions here. The key is in finding activities which both parties are independently passionate about. My all-time favourite movie is this Kannada movie called Ganeshana Maduve, which I’ve watched at least 20 times. At least 15 of these were before 2009, when I first met Pinky. By then, she too had watched the movie at least 15 times. Both of us are independently passionate about it and we never seem to tire of it. We use dialogues from the movie in everyday conversation, and watch it every time it comes on TV (the other day, it was playing on ETV Kannada early in the morning. As soon as my mother-in-law saw that it was playing she rang me up. I DVRd it, so now we can watch it every day if we want).

Pinky and I are both passionate about Ganeshana Madhuve. We are passionate about long intellectual conversations (which is what made us talk as much as it did back when we were just “blog friends”). We love experimenting with food, both in terms of cooking and eating. Unfortunately the list isn’t as long as we might have liked it, so sometimes we need to invent shared passions. So far we’ve tried imposing our respective individual passions on one another, and that hasn’t worked out too well. Is there a way out?

I can think of one way out. Jointly trying to develop interests in activities neither of us knows much of currently. The odds there are lower that we will both end up liking it, but then again, we are both at the same level. There is no leader and follower, and the disruptive dynamics that ruin passions we try to foist upon one another could be avoided. What do you think we should do?

Movies and thoughts

I find Bollywood movies thought-provoking. No, seriously. The thoughts that they provoke may not have anything to do with the movie itself, but provoke they do. This is in total contrast to, say, Spaghetti Westerns or James Bond movies, which are excellent tools for escapism. The good movies of the latter kind totally immerse you, have you completely detached from the real world, and are excellent tools to get you out of NED.

Maybe the thing with the Bollywood movies is that they don’t engage you enough. They don’t engage you enough in order for you to be immersed in them. And that leaves you with enough CPU time to start thinking of other things. Then, it is easier to empathise (in some form; maybe some 10% empathy if not more) with certain characters in certain Bollywood movies, which is impossible to do in case of characters such as James Bond or The Man With No Name. And this empathy will end up directing your spare CPU time to thinking about yourself.

Bollywood movies also have a lot of “slow moments”. Passages in the movie where nothing really happens, and this includes the songs. Passages where nothing enough happens, and which allows you to be able to switch off and devote your entire CPU time to the other thing that you are thinking of. Also, the language is generally easy enough that even if you were to miss a few dialogues (when lost in thought), you are able to catch up with the rest of the movie.

Maybe it has to do with the intent of the filmmakers. Whether they intend to make a gripping movie that will help the audience go off on an escapist trail, or whether they want to purposely keep the movie light so that it doesn’t demand much brain power from the audience. Or maybe it has to do with implementation. It may well be the case that someone wants to make a gripping movie, but does such a bad job of it that the minds in the audience start meandering. Or maybe the filmmakers try to make a movie where the audience sees the movie through the eyes of a certain character. But the problem with that is that in such cases, there is the chance that the viewer equates himself with this character, and starts thinking of the similarities and differences, and focuses on himself rather on the movie.

It also depends upon the intent of the viewer, as to what he is expecting when he goes to the movie. Does he want the movie to present him a mirror so that he can see himself in the characters? Mostly not, I think. Does he go for general entertainment? Mostly yes, I think. Does he go to the movie for some sort of an escapist experience so that he can momentarily be detached from his normal life? Maybe yes, which I think signifies a higher fraction compared to “mostly not”.

I don’t see too many movies. Even those that I see are those that have generally been certified as hits. i don’t normally see art-house kind of movies – which are perhaps actually made to be thought-provoking. The last three Hindi movies I’ve seen (approximately) are Jaane Tu… , Jab We Met and Rock On. I have no clue what the intent of each of these movies was, though I would imagine they were made for general entertainment. Each of them ended up holding a mirror to me, and made me ask myself lots of uncomfortable questions while watching. Maybe the last Hindi movie that involved me enough to distract me from myself was Omkara. I wonder which of these movies I should regard as being better – the one that held the mirror or the one that made me detached.