Message Is In The Medium

Christopher Nolan’s Inception has emerged as one of the most favorite film of millennial nerds. The uniqueness of the film lies in the fact that it features in the list of indie mind bending thrillers and top-grossing mainstream sci-fi films at the same time. On one hand it is in league with movies like Predestination, Primer, The Man From Earth , etc. and simultaneously enjoys following like Star Trek , and superhero films. Since the day of its release, Inception has been analyzed and re-analyzed time and again. Its world and characters have long been subjects of debate, not to mention the cliffhanger climax, which have provided nerds with ample mental boners. But what I feel keep missing the discourse is why Nolan finds this story worth telling. What is the moral of this story. What is the dream world really about? Does it have a real-world counterpart? Is it possible that it exists solely for itself and has absolutely no reflection on the pop culture? Of course, it does. It i...

Recently we all found out that the Madras High Court banned TikTok application because it is indecent for children and it connects vulnerable impressionable kids to lurking sexual predators. If you read closely, the same argument applies to internet as whole and might even be used to ban internet as well. TikTok, not any more complex than Instagram or Dubsmash still gets a ban unlike the other applications simply for its content and not the company policy. It's like overthrowing democracy in India because there are too many corrupt politicians. But this is not really the first time that we have had such an approach to our problems. This really is the Indian way of dealing with any issue. The solution to every problem. Don’t talk about it. Ban it. We have caste discrimination in our country. A section of people are humiliated for what their ancestors did as a livelihood. So much that names of communities have been equated with swear words. How did we solve the problem? We ...

The election fever is soaring in the country with no one but politicians and media people going crazy over the supposed festival of democracy. Though they always find a reason to bellow through microphones, the season of election gives them a particularly bizarre energy. The powerful become vulnerable and the forbidden questions resurface. For the past one month I am being bombarded with advertisements and promises of Utopian worlds and fears of broken ones. I get calls from Arvind Kejriwal himself telling me what my problems are; Narendra Modi hopefully looks at me with innocent eyes from every web-page that I open. Suddenly everyone is a well-wisher. As an example, someone allegedly(they told me) from Aam Aadmi Party called me to inform me about my name being struck off the electoral roll. Though I was skeptic from the beginning, I played along and asked what I should do. The person at the other end told me not to worry in a completely mechanical tone, as if he had said the s...

Recently, I read Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, the fifth book in the series, and incidentally found out that the Constitution of India is less than half of the length of the fantasy novel. This piqued my curiosity and I wondered why more people do not read the Indian Constitution; why is it such a feared document and left only for the evil group of people who academically study law. Of course Indian people were never fond of reading and the times of literary dominance in Indian culture dates back to days when not much was really written and all literary works were composed orally and passed through spoken words. But even the tiny reading community of India shies away from the document defining and describing the rights of the citizens. I tried to look into the reasons why it is not a readable book for Indians. The Indian Constitution is accepted to be the longest constitution in the world. That might seem a daunting fact but the document is nowhere a tome, standing ...