Journey of a Filmmaker

I didn't want to skip a day of blogging just because I'm travelling. If I did then there is no use of having a smartphone after all. So what will I blog about today - about the very train in which travelling. While I was travelling in the about 2 months back to attend my final semester exams I had thought that could be my last journey on that train. But it turned out that I have travelled by the same train twice after that. And both these times I travelled a longer distance than I used to while in college. So it's just very ironical that I'm travelling by the same train today. More tomorrow from a new city...

Our college had a decent gym facility to feed the fitness freaks inside us. College going boys usually would have an interest towards building their bodies. May be it was the raging hormones or the natural intention to attract girls or whatever be the reason, being fit always felt great. Until about one month since the gym was opened, so many guys were thronging it in a “welcome attraction”. Well the welcome attraction soon faded away and the gym master became the only one visiting the gym regularly. Soon, My friends Suresh Krishan, Madhan (Maddy Mathan @ facebook) and I started giving company to the gym master at least with our regular visits to gym. We used to do some random exercises and we felt our muscles growing day by day. The one thing that we could not have at home was the all-round mirror arrangement in the gym. We could just look our toned body reflected and this added to the high that we got from working out. As our exercise routine was starting to become more mundane of

Having attended a lot of interviews in person and via phone and skype, the whole interview thing has started becoming some kind of a boring conversation where I just have to give some pre prepared answers to the most typical interview questions. But lately I attended an interview by an e-commerce enabling company whose name I would better give when I get selected and this was a totally different interview experience for me. May be if I reach a position where I would have to interview people for job, I would certainly re use the questions that I answered. The one very distinct feature of this interview was that it made me to mine the best and positive part from within. The HR on the other side was Nisha and she opened the interview with an introduction of herself. So sweet of her that she made a very long introduction that I became tensed may be she would expect the same kind of an impressive intro from me too. I gave an account my marine studies and then switching to engineering inclu

Many have this simple doubt – why is a manager paid more than the people under him while all the work is done only by the sub ordinates and the manager simply oversees them? Is it not unfair to underpay a working person and overpay someone who supervises? NO, it is not. The weight of managing people is very high. Only a few shoulders have developed the strength to carry responsibility with ease. Others just have to join the lot which wonders why the hell these managers are given perks. Responsibility is such an important thing. Some people just hate responsibility, some others pass responsibilities by pushing it someone who could well be a scapegoat, and only a few cherish responsibilities as if they were born for it. Feeling responsible for your success is the greatest feeling you can ever get. There are many situations when we succeed at something but we don’t feel it at all. We just sleep like it was any other day. This happens because your heart knows that you are not responsible

Ever heard a song on a loop and had that feeling that the song should go on playing and you simply wish that the tune doesn’t end at all? Well, it is second to none. Total addiction to music. Total addiction to tune. It has the power to surmount any soul and that’s why certain music are called soul-stirring. Today, I am in a hurry to write down something to keep up the flow. All I could come up with a list of lesser known songs that could potentially blow your mind away if you are one such lover of soul-stirring music. The first one on the list is “ketenna unnai” from Desham. It was composed by A R Rahman, the Mozart of Madras and no doubt it is a masterpiece of a music. Forget the lyrics and just start listening to the background music and the interludes. Its sheer experimental feel is sure to blow you away. Many of you would not have heard this song at all. It’s from the dubbed version of the Shah Rukh Khan starrer ‘Swades”. The surprise is the clever reuse of the tune earlier used

The whole of the batman trilogy by Christopher Nolan, Batman would abruptly disappear while still in conversation with people often offending Commissioner Gordon and many others. But only when the catwomen does the same thing to him in the last instalment he realises it in an amusing way saying, “So this is how it feels like?” That was when he got the taste of his medicine. I have so many of such weird behaviours like making people wait for my reply in chat (mostly because I used would be browsing with many tabs open simultaneously and often wasting my time deciding whether to close a tab or not – damn you, tabbed browsing) and not attending the phone while my friends call me (well, not intentionally but often accidentally because I used to have my phone in silent mode and wouldn’t mind throwing it away on my bed and go watch the tv for hours and coming back to see a double digit number of missed calls). As hypocritical as it may sound, I want the “typing” to appear once I hit send a

Sometimes I used to argue against God why there are so many gifted people who create magic with their lives and others who spend all their years being just a spectator to other's  show. Even when I am convinced of the fact that there cannot be a show without audience but why is it that the audience is meant to be an audience and why was he not given a chance to be a showman and enjoy the feeling of making a thousand others feel the way you expect them to by your showmanship. How are people chosen for a specific task to be performed throughout their life? Is it just a matter of chance or someone rigs everything from somewhere above? I don't  have an answer to this question. I have to discuss this thought with a lot of other equally interested and ignited minds to come up with even slightly probable axioms. Well, today's post is not going to a spiritual search leading to God but it is going to be about epiphanies. We all know some famous epiphanies of history - the discove

Disciplining myself into a habit seems to be very tough task to me. Take for example, this blogging challenge, I had kept good for about 12 days and now it feels very difficult to maintain it. But the best part is - having done it for these many days, I could not just throw it out of my daily routine easily. It hurts to turn away from writing something before going to sleep. I get a strong urge to do so every night. May be that's how habits are built. So however boring it may be for any of you who chose to read this after this point, please don't  stop reading in between because once you start eating a meal you got to have it in full to enjoy the full taste however bad it is. Only then you can proudly say, I had the full dinner and it was a complete shit. May be after reading this post you will say to yourself, "what the hell was that I just read?". Some of you may even defy the digital rules and try yelling at me. Any way any reader yelling at his screen is not goin

            It would not be easy for you to believe if I said Fight Back, my first short film on youtube was in the development for more than one and half a year. Well, First I must confess that action is not really my genre but I also love to watch some stylish action flicks. Truly a stylish action flick of my kind is very hard to make with all the resources I can ever have. This is how it all started. If I remember rightly, it was May of 2013 and JayaPrakash (the lead actor of Fight Back) pitched an idea for a short film where the main character wants to fight but he couldn’t. I was really attracted to the frustration of this character and I came up with the title “Fight Back” in a few days. We then had a photo shoot with JayaPrakash posing as an action hero. Those snaps are still a great fun to look at! I started brainstorming for the script matching the title. Yeah! We actually had a title but no story. I was in hostel during those days and my choice of locations were

Spirit is the most important ingredient for success. If you have the spirit, nothing else really matter. One who has a fountain within him which produces this spirit infinitely can have anything he desires in this world. But that fountain certainly is very rare. What is more common is the fast fading spirit that is prevalent among every one of us! Ever felt lightning streak of patriotism emanate from within you when you hear A R Rahman strike the chord with his Vande Mataram? Ever felt an urge to do something impactful immediately after a highly motivational lecture? Ever thought of quitting all your bad habits in a fit after a heartbreak? Ever made up your mind to step forward against all odds after watching an inspiring movie? Ever read a quote which felt like a direct injection of energy into your heart making it pump extra blood through your veins pushing you out of procrastination? This instant “maggi” kinda stuff is what I call the fast fading spirit. It will give you a high li

I used to type (lol, write) stories from a very young age. Storytelling had been my habit since childhood and most of the times my sister used to be my only audience. She has a taste for really good stories and she seriously improved my stories. I took typewriting classes at a very early age (I was the youngest in the class and my next senior was at least 7 years older than me) and my father bought me a typewriter to practice at home. That was a time when computers were a luxury. I didn’t know what to do with the typewriter. I mean, I knew I’ve to type with it but I didn’t want to do the same “asdf ;lkj” practice at home. So I just used to type anything that came to my mind. They were mostly adventure stories involving super heroes (aka the heroes of masala films). I would then have that one type written manuscript of the story with my colour pencil drawn cover circulated among my cousins and friends in turns. Although everyone seemed to enjoy them, I now know that they were all out

While I was in IV grade of school, I was fortunate enough to be one of the good rankers in the class. But that didn’t stop with the school day privileges of the monitoring the class and all. Our class teacher had a weird rule. All the top rankers of the class must participate in the elocution competition. Well, I had a date arranged with the biggest demon of myself. I didn’t have the courage to tell no to my class teacher either. That was it. The competition was a week away and the given topic was “Indira Gandhi”. My sister was so excited and my dad was too. He even went one step higher. When he found that I was trying to chicken out by all means, he came up with the best of deals. That really sounded great. I had a great liking for toy guns in that age. Of all the toys I ever had in my childhood, gun would form at least 70% of them. I never asked for any other crackers during Diwali, I just used to get a revolver typed toy and spend the whole Diwali season blasting the roll cracker

I was brainstorming for almost an hour to come up with a topic to tick today off my 21 days of blogging challenge. Finally, I reached almost a decade back in my memory lane to reminiscence about the game that I used to play with my friends while at school. I doubt, whether it could be called a game technically, because it was more of a gamble. The rules of the game are simple and there were only three of us. Ganesh Karthikeyan, Madhan and I. We each chose a group of vehicle individually. For example, Ganesh chose Jeep modelled vehicles and Madhan chose Tata made vehicles and I chose vehicles of the automobile maker Maruti. Every day after having lunch, we three used to stand in the corridor and start counting the vehicles going on the road. I mean, if a Zen or an Alto passes then I take a point and similarly if a Bolero or a Qualis passes, then it’s Ganesh. And this count was cumulative, we used to remember the counts for days together till once for all we lost interest in the game.

Being single minded and fully dedicated to achieve one sole objective is often overrated. I will just tell you why it didn’t work out in my life. This post is about the importance of having a plan B however confident you are about the Plan A. Let me begin by unusually citing the example of Titanic. We all know that it sank because of the imperfection in Plan B (I mean the insufficient life boats). Till the middle of January this year I was too hopeful of getting into the premier institutions of India – the IITs. Only after looking at my result that I realized that I was ‘too’ hopeful. Without the ‘too’ it would have been a lot better because I wasn’t let ‘too’ behind. I was just 1 mark short of qualifying. Even that one mark would have landed me only in the fierce competition of the next level. So I was not heartbroken by the result. But the bad news was I had no other plans and I was virtually in a dead end. For about 2 months I just had IITs in my mind working without a thought abo

You might have guessed right! I selected Chetan Bhagat’s “Five point someone”. And I truly believe that it was this book that got me here! I luckily got the side seat in the train. I completed reading the book in one full stretch. It was not a great piece of literature but it struck a chord with me. I was just enticed into doing engineering. It’s been more than a year I was out of college and I was more than craving to get back. Note: If anyone of you were wondering what happened to my passports and certificates that were with the agent in Dehradun, don’t worry I got them all back. Without going much into details, Dad had some political influence and he leveraged it and of course he took most of the efforts himself. It may sound weird but even now if I am given a chance I would happily go to college forever! I may not love listening to long boring lectures and doing the routine assignments. But there is something else that attracts me to the world of learning. May be I am too scared

Yeah of course, the return journey made all the difference. It just didn’t take me across different cities of India I’ve never been before but also made me contemplate a lot on my abilities and more importantly on my true calling. The journey started from Dehradun, the furthest I’ve ever been from my home. I boarded a bus from Dehradun to Delhi. It appeared just like the bus we would naturally visualize in North India. But the places it passed through were historic. May be not every place but I remember taking a halt at Panipat. Ah! The number of wars fought on the land came as a flash in to my mind. But there was a highly emotional contemplation that was going on my mind. Usually after a heartbreak, I tend to take decision in a fit. I know that’s very unhealthy behaviour but the adrenaline or whatever pumping in just makes me feel like I suddenly am filled with an invincible spirit that energizes me (Well, that’s just for a while). I was planning to get rid of my marine life comple

After a long time I am writing something very personal. I have been asked this question a lot of times by many of my friends. Every single time I would just reply it’s a very long story and dodge. There are only a handful of my very close friends who know this flashback of mine. And here it is for all of you to read and contemplate on. After 12 months of taking Pre-sea training at IMU, Chennai I was too reluctant to join engineering when my parents tried convincing me. I spent the next whole year at home and traveling almost the length of India trying to get myself on-board a ship so that I could spend the rest of life traveling the world. I went to Mumbai twice and literally passed the days over the whole stretch of the world’s largest city shuttling between places in the metro trains. But the whole Mumbai operation ended in vain and I couldn’t get on-board even after a lot of efforts. While returning from Mumbai I came to know about an agent in Dehradun who then promised to get mys