One replay that should not be played during the highlights!!

They say (who are 'They' anyway? the 'elite'? the 'chosen ones'? aliens from Betelguise's solar system?) it takes a dramatic occurrence to move mountains.. and it takes something equally dramatic to make me shed my extreme 'blog inertia' and get me to start writing on my blog again.. and this time, the event was something that cost 40 crores and took many years to make - a 3-hour torment of the mind called 'Action Replayy'.

Its films like this that make one wonder about the future of the human race, or whether there is any future at all. The film forces you to shut your brains down the moment the first scene plays, because any person in the audience still trying to think and make any sort of sense out of or connection between the series of scenes he is subjected to in the first five minutes will either

a) be totally lost

b) go insane and start talking to his pet chair

c) take a solemn vow to wear a lead and titanium helmet to the next Bollywood movie he watches so that he is shielded from 'WTF' waves emanating from the screen

One theory is that the first half had 80 editors for 80 minutes of the movie and each was locked in a separate dungeon fifty miles from anyone else so that no one could see the one minute of movie anyone else had edited. That would explain the disconnect between every single minute.

In time, the film changes from a series of disconnected shots to a Paris fashion show with a specially rendered 70's Mumbai as the ramp and a series of very lively and equally clueless homo sapiens's as the models. Its a whole series of hairdos and costumes and sometimes the actors get to open their mouths too, but without committing the crime of actually making any sense. There is no explanation as to why Miss Mala (Rai) suddenly falls in love with a person she knows is a total jackass just because he sports a new hairdo. The people from the past never seem to question how a new dude suddenly drops out of the sky and infiltrates an influential household. And how these rich people got rich while being so meek that a kindergarten girl could hold them at gunpoint with a candy bar. And why these influential people suddenly start listening to the dude from the sky and totally listen to him even though he dresses in nightwear and gives advice like a college guy on crack.

I could go on and on but I did not start this entry to rant about yet another mindless brainless misadventure that the audience is subjected to every Friday. Sure you get away to the movies to relax and take a break but it doesn't mean you shut your brain down and have immense nonsense drilled into it. Is this the kind of 'entertainment' that we are willing to accept today? The film had a budget of 40 crore.. And I do not know if this is exclusive of the humongous pay the main actors get. Someone actually spent so much and took years to make people wear rainbow costumes and parade against 3D rendered backdrops. Could this kind of money not be used for solving at least some of the teething problems facing the human population today? Oh don't get me wrong, i'm not about to start preaching or be a 'change agent'. That, by our standards today, is a crime. Change agents are arrogant jackasses. We are content listening to the prose given by the 'big people' on the screen and how they believe that that new car over there is the greatest invention ever on Earth, second only to a cure for AIDS. We cannot blame anyone for the 'entertainment culture' prevalent today, no way. It is we who accept 'entertainment' like this and actually encourage this culture. We have a powerhouse of thinking machinery and trillions of terabytes of knowledge and experience in our brains as a collective entity and we let it all go into creating a culture that turns out things like this every week. We could be thinking and creating a better world for ourselves, a more regulated and sophisticated environment. But no, that's too lofty and far-fetched and will never work. So what is happening today is the 'right' thing.

So what is the definition of 'right'? We cannot say, because there is nothing called right or wrong. The concept of right or wrong exists only in our minds and it is only our collective concurrence that defines 'right' and 'wrong'. And the few who do not accept this theory are labelled iconoclasts and filthy rebels. Galileo, Copernicus, Newton, Einstein, Martin Luther King, Gandhi, they've all been there. (Yeah the 'big' guys.. I thought I'd get some big names in to create brand value) They went against collective psychology and were labelled as iconoclasts. By his powerful charisma and dedication and inimitable strategy, Gandhi changed the definition of what was 'right' at the time and popularized Ahimsa (non-violence - i.e. something you should not attempt to preach when a 300-pound boxing champ is chasing you with a baseball bat, but only when mean people from across the sea colonize your country). Not everyone has the power to change what we call 'right'. Our education system is today a factory for churning out millions of brain-dead zombies each year. Where are the confident, assertive and forward-thinking people the education system should be breeding? Non-existent. And this is, in our definition, somehow 'right'. The few who go against this - Marilyn Vos Savant, Chris Langan (look them up on youtube) are called 'arrogant rebels whose ideas just wont work and whose egos will tear their ideas apart'. Funny that these 'arrogant rebels' are in fact some of the most intelligent and forward-thinking people in the world today. But of course, any move that goes against the definition of 'right' we have created is a crime by our standards and if it continues, it is not too far off when such people will be labeled die-hard criminals. I just hope that doesn't happen and they don't get jailed :) they're nice guys and should be left alone until we can understand them :) And when the day finally dawns when people see the light in their ideas, they will be labeled heroes but of course they'll be too far away by then to hear us. An apology to Galileo four hundred years after he died won't be heard even by his bones - even those will have decomposed.

A child born into the world today is forced to live in a web of tangled ideas and confusion that humans have created for themselves. Any action to try and make sense of this web or try to stitch it into a meaningful pattern is called arrogant or criminal and cast aside, rudely I might add :) (tough luck for the sensitive people out there.. but hey maybe a dude from the sky can change your hairdo so that you become a hundred times more confident instantaneously. Yeah that 300-pound bully whose chasing you with a baseball bat - tell him you are changing your hairdo and see the fear in his eyes) Nobody trains children to question things, only to adapt to what is told to them as 'right'. And what is 'right' today seems to be a culture of brainless entertainment and one of feeding on the drama, tension and frustration projected by media and anybody with a broadcasting device looking to become popular instantaneously onto our television screens. We are slowly training our brains not to think and not to question but just to adapt to what is told to us as 'right'. And the more we train ourselves into submission, the more easy it is for an 'elite few' to get up on a stage and tell us what is 'right' and what we should be doing. We are slowly turning down our most valuable asset, our ability to think and question. And if we pick up the pace and do this fast enough, we may not need to wait until December 21 2012 for Doomsday. And the cause will not be a fictitious rock from outer space which apparently has been hurtling toward us for a hundred years but which surprisingly even the most powerful telescope is unable to detect. The cause will be the rock hurtling like crazy inside our minds and putting a lid on those parts that still think and question.