When are we happy?

Three of Us (2022)
Director: Avinash Arun Dhaware

Memory changes with time, but time is independent of memory. Time, a construct of man, moves on as our Universe expands toward entropy, with or without our existence. The memory we hold so dear to our hearts has become our badge of honour as we traverse through life. Our memories of life are our crowning glory. In our minds, as far as our life is concerned, time fits into the concept of Sasa and Zamani as described by JS Mbiti as an African concept of time. 

Sasa covers a time already experienced and an extremely brief future. Our Sasa, the memory of the past, becomes more significant as we spend more time on Earth. It goes on as long as we, as an individual or a community, can remember an event or someone. After that, Sasa goes into Zamani, the graveyard of time where everything ends. The memory of loved ones and ancestors lives on in Sasa as they are reminded of them through regular rituals and anniversaries.

Hence, in African philosophy, there is no concept of the future. We live in the past as far as memory takes and the immediate near-future in front of us. The idea of a distant future, of an afterlife, is alien.

The past is nothing but the human mind as it remembers, the present is nothing but the human mind as it considers, and the future is the human mind in expectation.

At the end of time, we take a bow with the memories of everything we have experienced, endeavoured, and achieved in our lifetimes. This must be our parting gift as we wither away into the horizon, soon out of sight and eventually out of our memory. 

Losing our memory before our time is out can be devastating. By right, the physical body would wither away long before the thinking faculty fizzles out. Occasionally, our insight goes kaput. That is a problem, not for us, but for people around us as we misbehave in situations around us. But to count the days knowing very well that all that we understand and all the memories we have built in our memory cloud will be erased incrementally in the imminent future can be nerve-wracking. This film is the story of one such lady who is diagnosed with early-onset dementia. 

After learning about her medical condition and probably taking early retirement from her job at a divorce court, she decides to return to the town she grew up. She had been putting off her plans to return for a long time. After getting embroiled in family life and work and bringing up her son, who is now 19, in engineering school.

Maybe because her doctors are unable to tell her how fast her memory would go blank, she has a compelling need to revisit the home where she grew up. Her family had left the house in a sudden after a family tragedy. She never really had a proper farewell from her friends and had lost contact. 

Shailaja's intentions of returning to her roost are to reinforce her good memories of her school days, to reconnect with her schoolmates, and to revisit her family home. Her husband follows her on her week-long trip. She wanted to reinforce these memories before they faded for good.

Like an onion, layer by layer, her backstory comes to the fore; of her sister who had an accidental drowning at the family well, her secondary school romantic crush and the little memories here and there which did not mean much then, but looks like a gem now, lost forever. 

The whole presentation is laid out in a well-composed, slow-moving, mature pace without much masala or melodrama. The men (husband and childhood friend) are civil, and so are the childhood friend's wife and the rest of the occupants of her village.

We all look at our past and go under the false impression that our earlier life had been so fine. We lament the good old days forever and wish to turn back the clock. Boy, do I have news? Only when we go back and relive the life we once had do we realise that life was never a walk in the park at any time. We had our struggles and our lows. It is just that our mind prunes off all those unpleasant experiences. We are never happy!

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Two wrongs do not make a right

Mumbai Police (Malayalam, 2013)

When one thinks of a commercial Indian police drama or a police procedural film, the first thing that comes to mind is the gravity-defying stunts. Thankfully, this movie does not have any of those, but there is the blatant abuse of power and the idea of one man singlehandedly manning the whole is still there, nevertheless.

A police officer, Anthony Moses, is seen informing his superior, Farhan Aman, over the phone that he had solved the case they were working on and on his way to discuss it. A freak accident happens and he has selective retrograde amnesia. He does not remember his investigation but Farhan pushes him to finish what he had begun. The problem is that he does not remember even things about himself, his subordinates or who his siblings are. He learns many things slowly just by observing. 

Anthony realises that his previous self must have been quite a nasty character. His co-tenants had it enough with his previous antics and want him out of his apartment. His subordinates now find him pleasant. All the while, the fact about his amnesia is kept hidden from public knowledge so as not to jeopardise his investigations. The more Anthony digs into his past, the murkier his life appears to be. And then suddenly, a flight attendant enters his apartment from a long trip and gets cosy with him. Anthony is clueless about his status in his life. Yes, the flight attendant is a guy and seems romantically linked to Anthony.

'Mumbai Police' was the tag given to Farhan, Anthony and Aryaan as they had all trained in Mumbai. Aryaan was assassinated and Anthony was investigating Aryaan's murder when he was involved in an accident.

Memory is just an important component of our life as we know it. All our joys, anger, emotions, ambition and even our daily work depend on it. Memories are the only thing that we carry to the end of our journey of life. We fondly remember pleasant memories but painful ones are equally important in making us who we are today. Our ability to retain painful thoughts of the past is sometimes viewed as a curse of mankind. Life would be more peaceful if we did not continue to act upon negative outcomes of old events. On the other hand, however, these distant memories make us smarter when a similar situation arises. But then, we, as a human race, have a poor track record of not repeating mistakes of the past.

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Living on borrowed times

Radiopetti (Radio Box, Tamil; 2015)

I used to wonder why the humming of the radio was the constant background of my home as I was growing up. At the first break of dawn, if Appa had the choice and not for Amma's nagging, it would start with the early morning chanting of Subrapaatham and just breeze through the day and night until transmissions ended. Yes, there used to be a time when even broadcasters called it a day, mostly at the stroke of midnight.

At that time, the radio announcers' songs and rants sounded more like a nuisance, as my sisters and I were busily cramping our cranial vaults with facts and notes to regurgitate in the next tests. Nobody could understand Appa's fixation with his cranky radio box, which he later graduated to a transistor radio. It was not that the devices were manufacturing Top 40 hits. Sometimes, only white noise or high-pitched zapping sounds emanate when he tunes in to the short-wave bands from Kuala Lumpur or Singapore. 

But he continued this practice till his dying days...

The delicacies we consumed in childhood taste much better than the same thing available now. At least the memory of it is. It is probably the same reason why old songs mean so much. Every song, food, smell, and sensation that tickles our tastebuds is associated with a particular moment. Every byte of information stored in our grey cells is linked to one specific event in our existence; a fond moment with our loved ones, the yearning for an unfulfilled romance, a blissful time that would never come back or a time when things were simpler.

This low-budget, low-frill, award-winning movie never really made headlines. Only through word of mouth did it come to my attention. 

 Arunachalam, probably in his 60s, spends most of his time relaxing on his lazy chair after retirement, listening to the transmissions from his old diode radio set. Ired by the constant blaring of the radio, his only child, probably in his mid-20s, leaves his paternal home after a tiff, smashing his radio to smithereens. 

Six years later, Arunachalam and his wife spend their time in sheer solitude. The couple is engrossed in their routine. Arunachalam is busy working as a clerk in a cotton mill. His wife, Lakshmi, is happy serving her husband. The memory of their son pops up every now and then. His contact is limited to his occasional phone call. The son is living with his wife and her family elsewhere. For company, they have a fellow tenant downstairs whose husband works overseas and her tantrum-throwing pre-teen son. 

Arunachalam's old radio is only a distant memory. Lakshmi's surprise gift, a transistor radio, rekindled his suppressed memories. The broken diode radio was one of the only remaining assets of Arnachalam's now deceased parents. The rest of the movie highlights the loneliness endured by the senior members of society. After fulfilling their familial duties, unable to keep up with the demands and changes in values of the generations next, they are generally left to fend for themselves. Their life is mired in silence, with an occasional highlight of a visit of a long-lost friend or relative. 

Even if they are financially taken care of, boredom is the basal undertone. Just how much of TV can one indulge? Nostalgia, which has a bad reputation for making people delve into the past rather than looking at the future, is not all that bad. With the curse of a long life, perhaps an unhealthily long life sustained by advances in medical sciences, longevity may be a curse. As if dragging their feet into the twilight of their existence, sweet memories of the past may be the only thing that keeps the bunny going. The presence of crazy friends in their lives goes a long way...

A good movie, 4.5/5.

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Something about blue gold...

Credit: topdocumentaryfilms.com

We all know the drill - that up to 70% of our body is filled with water; that 70% of the Third Rock from the Sun is covered by water and that it is the elixir of life. We also accept oxygen and hydrogen molecules could be alien visitors who landed on Earth via meteorites that reached here.

Scientists agree that water is indeed a strange chemical. With its composition, it should be in a gaseous state, not liquid as it is. Unlike other solids, water in a solid state is less dense, encouraging lifeforms to live and prosper under an iceberg. Capillary action ensures that water reaches the highest leaf of the giant redwood and the minuscule of the body organs.

I will not do justice to the WhatsApp that my childhood friends and I share if I do not divulge some of the new things that were brought to my attention through them. Water has memory. Having been around for so long on this planet, it only makes sense. The same water molecule that was drunk by a dinosaur must be traversing in our bodies right now. It is said that information of contact with materials is kept trapped within spaces within molecular bonds in electromagnetic energies.


French immunologist, Jacque Benveniste, in the 1980s tried to show to the world, that anti-IgE antibody, even when diluted to very minute undetectable levels, still evoked a response in the body when exposed. His findings were allegedly suppressed as it tends to support homoeopathic medicine where medications are given in very low doses to prevent ailment. No proper explanation could be given to this unique discovery. It is subsequently shot down and labelled as a hoax.

In came Nobel laureate, Luc Montagnier, who had a hand in the discovery of the HIV virus. He replicated Benveniste's findings and went one step further. Montagnier posited the idea that water has memory and its information is stored within the ring of water molecules. Diluting HIV viruses incrementally to an undetectable level, in a peer-reviewed study, he proved that water has the memory of having had HIV in the more concentrated mixture through electromagnetic measurements.

It gets more technical after that. Using a telephone line, the electromagnetic information of the water is transmitted to another location and through transduction process (PCR), he managed to recreate the HIV virus on the other side!

All these may sound Greek to most of us, but to the scientists, this is a great challenge what the practitioners of the classical sciences have come to believe. It opens the floodgates of quantum physics and other realms of the unknown. It is a paradigm shift in how we have come to understand science. Interesting.

To complicate things further, now a Japanese scientist, Masaru Emoto, has shown that the appearances of water crystals when exposed to different chantings, music or human emotions are different. Are they telling that our body, which is predominantly made of water, will react differently when exposed to different environments? Are they hinting that holy water has healing powers? Does chanting and recital of mantra serve a higher function that we, ignoramus fools are too simpleton to comprehend?

BBC clip on Water

2014 Documentary on Water Memory

Masaru Emoto's Water Crystal Experiment!

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Why we take pictures?

Shirkers (2018)

Producer and Director: Sandi Tan

Imagine our life is like a giant boulder rolling down slowly the street without stopping. All along its path, it would be collecting grime and shedding filth at the same time. Some of the dirt that it picks up sticks for a good while others may leave as quickly as it is get attached. In our passage of life, every encounter is an event. Some contacts stay to build an everlasting bond and others may just be mere passing memories. Sometimes, we cling on to these flitting moments. We yearn to relive those moments as we feel we could have achieved more if we had followed a different trajectory or at least gasped to that speckle a little longer.

That must be the reason why old photographs and footages evoke the kind of emotion that questions our existence. Spiralling our memories to a specific time and space could stir the avalanche of sensation that could make us wonder if our lives would have different if we had taken a different path. 

This documentary made by a Singaporean is a trip down memory lane of sorts. Three teenage girls got together with a filmmaker teacher to make a simple movie depicting the ordinary lives of people around the streets of Singapore. In spite of the teacher’s promise to do the post-production finishing touches on it and its subsequent release, it never came to fruition. The teacher went missing.

20 years on, after sailing the rough seas of life, the brain behind the venture, Sandi, decide to delve into this missing time capsule; especially after receiving an email from the teacher’s ex-wife from another corner of the world to take reels of film that belonged to Sandi as she was about to dispose of them.

This journey into exorcising the ghost had haunted her whole life also opened the can of worms that covered her teacher’s colourful life. 

An exciting watch from our southern neighbours. It managed to snatch many international accolades. 

Point to ponder: We all agree that we capture that special moment for us to savour on in our lives. But surely, clicking at every angle and being the centre of every picture is not normal. We should appreciate the beauty of a natural landscape, not be the main subject every time while the landscape as the backdrop always. 

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Rare photographs

Thanks KC for the contribution. Cheerio.

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