We are losing our leaves

The Father (2020)

The good die young, they say. So we look sentimentally at the 'Club 27' and bemoan their premature departure from the world of music; we lament the loss of many of their yet composed pieces. We remember them forever as the spirited and creative maestros they were. But, on the other hand, we abhor the many who had obviously overstayed their welcome; a particular nonagenarian two-time ex-Prime Minister comes to mind. It seems the longer we seem to stay alive, the further we get away from the public likeability scale. 

Perhaps we tolerate the old because of fear of what would become of us. In the hope of hope, we think all the good deeds will somehow be recorded and duly reciprocated by the Universe! Maybe, we are struggling to stay afloat in this Ocean of Life that we are looking for support in what we are doing. With the wisdom of having traversed similar paths, we secretly wish that they would give a nod of approval to our actions. 

Jim Morrison, Amy Winehouse and Kurt Cobain 

27 club (has at least 10 members)

We have fond recollections of young relatives, of children who succumbed to ailments way before their time. We remember the charming smile, their pranks and good times spent together. But, unfortunately, it is not the same of a sick relative who demanded de has to endure terminal care of a protracted. Despite all the good times they had offered in their happier, somehow, the memory that lingers in our minds is the latter days of pain and suffering. That, unfortunately, seems to be the first image of them that comes to mind. 

We are familiar with movies highlighting the trials and tribulations of the caregiver or the mess that the person with a mental disorder goes through. Unlike the rest, this movie tells the narrative from the point of the sufferer. As confusing as the orientation to time, space and person can be to a person afflicted with dementia, we, the audience, also get unsettled by the linearity of the story. It keeps flip-flopping, the scenes appear repeated, the background keeps changing, and we cannot really pin down who the bad person. Actually, there are none. Everybody is merely playing their part.

We soon realise that the main character just wants to cling to what he sees as reality, convincing himself that he is not off his rockers, that his judgement is right, and he has everything under control. Despite all the abuses hurled upon her, his daughter feels that caring for her father and sacrificing all her personal desires and ambition is the most filial thing to do. 

Some like to believe that these lost opportunities and the serving are just unsettled business transactions from another lifetime that needed to be completed. Ageing is just like the shedding of leaves of a passing season. Just like a tree that sheds its blades in autumn to go into hibernation before springing out new shoots, old age and passing are inevitable. We 'pass away' into the annals of time. In Tamil, a dead person 'becomes time' - 'காலம் ஆனார்'. 

[P.S. The octogenarian Anthony Hopkin won an Oscar for Best Actor for his role in this movie].

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

No sacrifice?

The partially completed Kek Lok Si
temple in Penang in 1905. It holds
the dark secret of a melancholic
monk with self-inflicted wounds
after his tireless endeavours to
rebuild the temple was sabotaged
and bad-mouthed. In its annals
too, woven are the intriguing
narrations of the selfless services
of a young Dr Wu Lien Teh
who nursed him back to health.

What is a sacrifice? Is it an overused word with its meaning taken for granted? A suicide bomber is making a sacrifice when he decides to blow himself to smithereens to make a statement or to martyr himself for the good of those who share the same belief as him? Is he not being selfish as his own remunerations that await him in the afterlife? Is he being selfless or selfish when he plunges the red button?

Is the symbolism of death on The Cross the ultimate sacrifice for the human race? Is it true altruism when able bodies with the spring of youth ahead of them give up their earthly pleasures to serve God and the downtrodden? Can volunteers who endanger themselves in the vein of Father Damien to care for lepers or Franciscan friars signify the pinnacle of human renouncement?

Are politicians or pop stars who clamour to be afront flashes of pixels to be seen giving and caring, spread more goodness to the world? 

Is it sacrifice when a hungry mother willingly serves the only remaining bowl of broth to her offspring knowing well that she can withstand hunger pangs better than her young? Or is the random kindness that one extends to a stranger, but then there is no sacrifice, is there? Should it be just second nature to help?

Should we just send another soul as a sacrificial lamb and claim that we had forgone something close to gain points? Some insist that living a simple life, forfeiting simple pleasures of life beget special considerations for Judgement Day.

Lt. Col. Arnaud Jean-Georges Beltrame (18 April 1973 – 24 March 2018)
killed by ISIS terrorists after having exchanged himself for a hostage. [Wiki]

Or is it in a selfless act of devoting one's life to an obviously bleak situation, knowing pretty well the outcome just because it is your job?

https://asok22.wixsite.com/real-lesson

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

If it makes you happy!

A sane person would not accept that what he is doing will amount to anything. How is his suffering and sacrifice is any way going to change the course of the universe? Are the forces of Nature going to melted by his predicament and be moved by his pain? The realist will say that the apparently chaotic and sometimes cruel turn of events is choreographed to maintain law and order in the universe!
But... That is not going to stop him.
Three years ago, his conjugal union with his loved one produced an equally charming offspring. Perfect by every sense and too good to be true. He started thinking he must have something right in his life to beget something so right. His son was well liked by everyone including The Maker that The Maker decided to keep his handiwork to himself. It was all so sudden and the flashbacks are so vivid and surreal. Like a bizarre dream sequence where things happened right under your nose and you are too paralysed to react, his loved one, at one instant was playing with his toy and was lifeless on the floor the next. Reeling forward, there was mention of brain anomaly and abnormal vasculature but what he was left with were only memories of his first born and a garlanded portrayed image of him to remind the family that he is in a better place.
At about the time that the deceased was supposed to be two years of age, his wife announced of an imminent addition to the clan. Jubilant he was but what the meaning of all of this, he thought. What the Gods give, they also take leaving him high and dry.
He embarked on a spiritual journey of fasting and hunger pangs. He sacrificed simple pleasures of life. He control his gustatory desires and got the best of medical advice for his wife and newborn. He suffered along with prayers hoping to appease the Divine forces that give and take lives. 9 months progressed at snail's pace.
Alas, when the recipient of half DNA popped out with much pomp and excitement, he was overjoyed. What he saw in the eyes of the newborn is the very same eyes that fizzled out a years previously. The Gods have spoken, he thought and he promised to renew his belief and would forever surrender his life and soul to his master of universe. He is in ecstasy.
A realist or practical person would probably scorn at the act of the subject of the story. He would accuse him of belittling the intelligence of an average man. Like as if his prayers somehow worked out for his favour because the Forces took pity on his rumblings. Like it is so easy to change the course of nature by just enduring some sacrifices.
Well, that is how, from time immemorial, people have been seeking blessings from the Divine. Bearing pain, abstinence, shunning material wealth and choosing to live amongst the deprived, the underprivileged and downcast seem to surest and shortest way to reach God.
If it makes him happy, what's wrong? If it gives him a steady rock to anchor his confidence whilst he fights the high winds, what wrong?

Probably that is what Sheryl Crow told Lance Armstrong while he was transfusing those secret concoctions, blood and performance-enhancing drugs!

Trust and Conviction?

The Quiet Duel (静かなる決闘, Shizukanaru Kettō, 1949)
Director: Akira Kurosawa

Fancy seeing a scrubbed up surgeon
with a cigarette on his lip?

If Toshiro Mifune is usually seen as rash hotblooded gangster or samurai in most movies, this Kurosawa's regular star is seen portraying a quiet tight-lipped conscientious doctor. His co-star is another regular, Takashi Shimura as his father.

The quiet duel in the title refers to the constant struggle within one's self whether to satisfy his own desires versus the moral codes set up by the society or conscience. And sometimes the price to pay can be enormous. 

The story starts in a rundown military hole-ridden leaking hospital where an overworked sleep-deprived surgeon who is fighting against his biological needs of sleep and rest tries desperately to save his war-stricken patients. With limited helping hand, he somehow pulls through. In one of these stressful situations, he injures himself with an open scalpel.
Fearing for the worse, he gets himself and the patient's blood tested for syphilis.
Apparently, syphilis was reputed as a death sentence then. When young men with raging hormones were left wondering away in stressful situations, these soldiers were expected to patronise comfort women for conjugal pleasures.
The blood tests returned as favourable to a truly devasted Dr Kyoji Fujisaki (Toshiro Mifune). His fate was sealed. Treatment was protracted and not readily available. His plans to wed his sweetheart all came crashing down.

Doing good does not make you
immune from misery!

Fast forward...post-war Japan...
Dr Kyoji is still working as a dedicated doctor, now in a rural small private hospital run by his father, a gynaecologist, Dr Konosuke Fujisaki (the versatile Takashi Shimura) and himself. His sweetheart still hangs around the hospital as an assistant nurse hoping that Dr Kyoji would change his mind to marry her. The good doctor, fearing of spreading the disease to his future and child had decided to be celibate until the condition is hopefully adequately treated in a few years' time. As her biological clock was ticking away, he advised her to marry someone else without telling her the real reason. A simple answer like 'the war had changed him', he thought would suffice.

Do the stars determine your fate?

Maybe, at this time and age, with women's empowerment and such, such a statement may not be politically correct. But then, we have to understand the social contract in that era where the society was patriarchal and women docile (or is it woman like?).
Pretty soon when the medicine used to treat syphilis repeatedly went missing, the doctor's little secret comes to the knowledge of his father and another assistant nurse. After learning the real manner how he was infected, they only give him the utmost respect. The assistant nurse has her own issue of being an unwed mother as a result of her stint as a nightclub dancer in her previous vocation. She is indebted to Dr Kyoji for giving her a new lease on life when she had attempted suicide when she was pregnant and abandoned.
As fate had it, the initial patient (Nakada) who had transmitted the disease to Dr Kyoji is met by chance in the course of his work. Unlike Kyoji who is living in constant fear and sorrow, the patient is entirely indifferent to his disease. He is enjoying his life, drinking, is married and his wife is pregnant. Dr Kyoji tries to warn Nakada, but it is met with resistance.
Eventually, Nakada and his wife land up at their hospital with a deformed stillbirth. Upon seeing this, Nakada becomes insane, unsure whether it is insanity or progression of syphilis.
Dr Kyoji's ex-sweetheart comes to the clinic for the last time before her marriage to say her farewell hoping for a last minute change of hearts on the part of the good doctor. He just sends her away without revealing the real reason.

The final farewell

After her departure, Kyoji's nurse confronts him on his course of action. That erupts the monologue that defines the title of the movie - the quiet duel! The duel within oneself of the correct decision one has to do if life. A person who thinks and is emphatic to others would practice self-sacrifice for others. A lackadaisical would literally bury his head in the ground and hope for the trouble to just disappear. It is akin to the two ways one can encounter physical pain - create a ruckus or grimace in silence. Kyoji narrates the battles that he had to endure between fulfilling his physical needs as a man versus the moral obligations of a doctor to thwart the spread of the disease. It’s an extended, tearful scene where Mifune fully reveals the depths of his feelings and his battles. This scene is something new for the oft tough appearing star!
We all encounter constant duels within ourselves to do what is only natural for our immediate gratifications against what is better in the long term, good from the perspective of a bigger picture. We take the first step in making that painful decision to do what we do on every Sunday morning hoping that it is a right decision that we would not live t regret later. It is all just trust. That's all. Trust that we are doing the right thing.