Today, I woke up after a bad sleep last night mainly owing to having convoluted, unpleasant dreams where the specific problem I was grappling with yesterday at work kept recurring in various forms in the dream. This always happens with me, and I am sure some of you out there would have had the same experience, after I have done one particular thing over and over for an extended time and exhausted my brain over the day.

There was an idea floating in my mind sometime before I started this with blog. The idea was to film my walk to the office. This might sound like a pretentious and uninteresting exercise but hear me out. There is so much a camera can document on my way to work. The bridge I walk through holds the Curry Road station. On the weekdays this is a rush-hour location from where hundreds of thousands of office workers from up north and living around here roll into Lower Parel. Vehicular traffic is massive and the bridge intersection is the most chaotic. People everywhere, each with a different intention, hot sun, vehicles trying to almost threaten pedestrians blocking their way, the monorail bridge overhead steering south, the significant sunlight reflected off the building glass on Marathon Futurex. After you take a right from there and climb onto the east-west bridge crossing the Western Line and holding the Lower Parel station you catch sight of the most marvelous scenery. The high-rises of Worli and Lower Parel clearly visible, always under construction, never complete. This is only the backdrop to the second decade of the 21st Century. The people and their mannerism and the rush is the most exciting to watch. A new world to get lost in for 15 minutes.

But of-course such a film is never coming, not from me at-least. There is something about hyper-realistic films I have come to appreciate a lot after encountering the works of Richard Linklater. Take his Before Trilogy for example. The film is rather simple in its technicality but profound when it comes to execution. The actors and the direction is unprecedented. Its just two people walking by the city and talking to each other. Now, only someone who has experienced this lot can understand the uniqueness and the subversion of this act. To truly connect with another human being however brief a time, that might be the most revolutionary act - a revolution against the numerous instances and the majority fraction of life where we just glide by people and fail to notice or occupy their mind. A real-life incident informed and gave Linklater inspiration to make this film. Traveling from New York to Austin, Linklater met a girl in Philadelphia with whom he spent a night roaming the streets and doing nothing in particular but talk. The girl actually died off a motorcycle accident just before the release of the first film in the trilogy. As tragic as the real-life story of the director and the girl he met is, many details are changed in the film. The real couple never met again for example. Somehow changing this story to not reflect exactly what happened in real life Linklater’s film becomes a greater force, a greater reality than what actually happened. You see all these marks in Linklater’s another film which is genius in its own right, Waking Life. To cut the bullshit, to recognize this and make a film of such subtlety is also pure fun to watch on screen. Do take time to watch it if you get the time.

See you tomorrow,
Avi.