Masala Movie, Profound Dialogues


Late one night, when I couldn’t fall asleep, I decided to watch some TV. And as luck would have it, I ended up watching a very thought provoking exchange of dialogues in the movie, The International. The movie’s a regular Hollywood masala flick about a very powerful, evil bank versus an Interpol agent, Louis Salinger.

The part I saw has Salinger trying to get a very old ex-communist from East Germany, Wilhelm Wexler (who is now a senior guy at the bank) to spill the beans on the bank. Salinger tries to use ideology to persuade Wexler to defect and asks him how a man who supported communism and hated capitalism all his life could now be working for such a big, capitalistic institution? I loved Wexler’s answer:
“Well, this is the difference between truth and fiction. Fiction has to make sense.”
That is so true. Our lives don’t necessarily have a “purpose”, it often just seems to meander on; and I don’t mean that in a “I am so depressed; let me kill myself” kind of way.

A couple of minutes later, the old man goes on to explain why life is that way:
“We cannot control the things life does to us. They are done before you know it, and once they are done, they make you do other things. Until at last everything comes between you and the man you wanted to be.”
Or as they say: one thing leads to another. And before you know it, you can be completely and often irreversibly off course from where you wanted to be.

In case all this sounds very depressing, then wait till you hear Salinger’s response to the above:
“Sometimes you find your destiny on the road you took to avoid it.”
Sometimes. You just have to hope that it happens to you yet.

What is it about Western audiences that allows for such dialogues from both the bad and good guys even in their masala movies?

Comments

  1. KumarFebruary 15, 2013 at 12:18 PM

    Why, what Spiderman said has become a good quote, "With power comes great responsibility".

    Not that it is not known before but something about he way Spiderman uttered it makes it catchy. (That quote is extremely relevant in India where there is a scam a week. Our politicians have gone by the motto for decades now, "With power comes great money (yes, yes - for politicians' comfort and personal use), and with power comes a lot of people falling at our feet and praising us like god for improper favors; and once power comes, there is of course the ability for us, the politicians, to stay above the law!")

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Student of the Year

Image
As a toddler, my daughter loved Alia Bhatt’s songs, esp. the ones from Student of the Year . (That movie did have many good songs and well-choreographed dances). Fast forward to present day, when she is 12 yo. She rarely watches Hindi movies now, but one of the few ones she likes of late, Raja aur Rani ki Prem Kahani has, yes, Alia Bhatt.   If I had any hopes that there was anything to be read in the name of her toddler-time favorite ( Student of the Year ), they have been dashed. Our conversations come exam time are perfectly captured by this photo and its caption: In fact, the pic below captures how she and I look at her answer sheets – me intently, she with an expression of “It’s over, so why are you even looking at it?”   Of late, we pull her leg and tell her that she isn’t showing any signs of academic prowess, she’d better find a rich guy to marry. Some time later, she showed us this meme on the Internet: “Me No Study, Me No Care Me Go Marry Millionaire If He Die
Read more

The Retort of the "Luxury Person"

Image
Coming up with biting and witty retorts. It’s something we dream of, but rarely manage to pull off. Worse, the more we stew over the offending remark, the more likely we are to come up with that dream retort, as Calvin ruefully points out: During our last holiday at the Taj Resort, seeing my wife carrying towels to our poolside chairs, one of the kids there mistook her for a member of the staff and asked for a towel. When my wife narrated this to us, I did not imagine that my 8 yo daughter would come up with her own retort. But a day later, my daughter recapped the incident, an incident that didn’t even involve her in the first place , and said, “You know what I’d have told that kid who asked for the towel?”. And without waiting for an answer, she told us anyway: “I don’t work here. I too am a luxury person who is living at this resort. Go get your own towel.” We were highly amused by the phrase she had coined: “luxury person”. It certainly captures the kind of holid
Read more

Animal Senses #7: Touch and Remote Touch

Instinctively, we think touch is based on contact. Not entirely true, explains Ed Yong in Immense World – there’s a more important aspect than contact: “These incredible feats are possible through movement. If you rest a fingertip upon a surface, you can get only a limited idea of its features. But as soon you’re allowed to move, everything changes. Hardness becomes apparent with a press. Textures resolve at a stroke.” As you run your fingers over a surface, they hit the tiny peaks and troughs and set off vibrations in the mechanoreceptors at their tips.   At the tip of its snout, the star-nosed mole has many pairs of hairless appendages. It uses them to touch things around itself. Alive or dead? Food or ignore? It does these movements at an insane speed. In the time it takes to blink our eyes, the star-nosed mole can probe, identify and swallow its food. “Light may be the fastest thing in the universe, but light sensors have their limits, and the star-nosed mole’s sense of
Read more