Shekhar Kapur

Do we need to make any sense ? Lecture on film at North Western University in Chicago

Was delivering ( I guess) a lecture on film at the Northwestern University in Chicago. This was a film history class and I am one of the most film illiterate people I know on the planet. By the time I got to be a film maker it was too late to catch up. Yet the students and I had a very interesting session. We plunged straight in to the ideas of 'not knowing'. How do you approach story telling without knowing the outcome. How do you completely surprise yourself. Is any art, including film making, an attempt towards exploration of the unknown ? For if it is not, then it is not art is it ? How do actually go out and try NOT to make sense, but allow the inherent tensions that exist within that exploration to surface, the inherent contradictions within you to surface, and these contradictions then begin to tell the story. Or some semblance of a story. Something emerges that you cannot take credit for, for the film had, or the story had it's own organic being. The story and you meet not in the realm of sense, but somewhere outside in the largesse of the universe where the story is not trying to make sense but is somehow provoking thought processes that have so much contradiction in them that they make sense and do not make sense at the same time. Like a boiling pot - with somehow sense coming to the surface but disintegrating into 'no sense' and sinking back, merely to give rise to the illusion and a tantalizing glimpse of sense again, only to fall back again into no-sense. Like all great poetry. Leaving the viewer/reader to connect the dots to try and create something of logic or of sense in it all. Or not.

Is this a dream I live in ?

" Is this a dream I live in ?" you asked me as we travelled in the car back from your tennis lesson. "But how would I know, for the word 'dream' does not come when I am really dreaming. What happens when I wake up ?" I was completely taken aback by your question, for you are still just 7 years old. Taken aback because for centuries the mystics and the wise ones have been grappling with this question. Except they may not call it a dream. They call it Maya, the illusion. Life is an illusion. It means the same thing.

Problem today is that many philosophers and mystics look down upon the 'dream life'. Like 'because it is an illusion, therefore it is something silly'. Not to be taken seriously. No my love, life is to be taken very seriously, for every thought, every action, every moment, every passion dissolves into a great churning that is your life. What is called your karma. And your karma is the connection between your universal self, your atman or soul, your god self, or anything you would like to call it, and your 'maya self', or your 'dream self'. It is what you experience when you wake up !....

]]> The 'maya self' is an essential part of your being though , a 'created reality' based upon your five senses and your desires, or as some describe it, based on your Ego. There is also much controversy about the word Ego. But because language can sometime sbe so limited, the Ego sometimes is defined in it's very obvious way - 'like so and so is egoistic'. But Ego but also has a deeper, more subconscious meaning often described as the super ego. Fundamentally we need to know that that the Ego, fueled by its own imagination and yearning is what provokes us to look for, and yearn for the Universal Ego and our the sublimation of the individual Ego to higher and more universal self.

If this all sound like a lot of words and complex and worthless intellectual indulgence, then it is my inability to somehow put together in language and words that which can only be understood by experience. That is why faith, prayer, meditation, art or any other creativity etc (like the wonderful evocative painting you do) can sometimes give you and insight in the universal self, or God inside you, what lies outside your dream life, what exists when you wake up.

So while it is really important to be aware of and nurturing your spiritual, creative and Universal self, , it is equally important to nurture the 'dream self'. One does not deny the other, but they should come in harmony to complement each other.

And the one way to do that is to always question. Like you are now. I hope you never lose that quality. Your Dream self and your universal were in complete harmony when you were born. You would speak of Angels existing in your imagination and in reality in the same vein. You understood that both the world's co exist. And really are one. Education, trying to come to terms with social behaviour patterns and just the daily challenges of living and being sometimes shake that belief in the oneness of the two existences. But keep asking these questions.

When the Buddha was dying, his disciple asked him - 'Who are you ?' and Buddha replied ' I am awake'. He finally came out of his dream world into a completeness that encompassed and dissolved his whole existence into eternity.

Daddy

Global Food Shortage, who are we kidding ? It's your daily starbucks that could be causing it !

Just came back from New York, where every paper is talking about food shortage, and the scepter of the US having to hoard food. In a country where it is impossible to eat your way through one serving, and where the biggest battle is not against terrorism but against over eating, it is a difficult idea to comprehend. And what did Condolizza Rice mean when she said part of the problem is a change in the eating habits of a more prosperous India and China. Like the world's problem are increasing because we are eating better or living better ? That is not true in any case, except for a mere 5% of India's population. But lets get this right. There has ALWAYS been a world food shortage. Since I can remember in any case. People in the US may not have noticed it, and those of us living in India, China, Africa and elsewhere may choose to avert our eyes to what is staring us in the face, but we have always been surrounded by people that live in a constant state of malnutrition and starvation.

So what do we mean when we say that prices are rising and food riots are breaking out ? What we mean is that something has gone wrong in the supply chain. That somewhere people have started to profit more from the supply chain, and somewhere people are hoarding. THAT THE PRICE OF FOOD HAS GONE OUT OF THE RANGE OF MOST POOR PEOPLE. But who controls that price, and if it is market forces, who controls those market forces ? Certainly not the individual farmers.

]]> I believe that there has been too much corporatization of agricultural resources all over the world over the last couple of decades. This is not just US bashing. It has happened with large scale farming everywhere, as food is grown, manufactured, packaged and distributed at the BEST AVAILABLE PRICE. Now in theory while the 'best available price ' may be said to be a good thing for the local farmers in India (say) , where the farmer can invest the money back in the local economy, over 99% of that price does not go back to the farmer. Nor in so many cases does the term 'local farmer' apply any more. In large scale agriculture for produce, more and more land is owned by organizations that do not farm the land NOR do they live where the land exists - so nothing goes into the local economy.

So entire swathes of land in South America and elsewhere are cultivated for Cocoa - and then turned into Starbucks product to feed a country alarmingly addicted to caffeine. All of this agricultural land that could otherwise be feeding the local population. The same can now be said about Soya cultivation, or mass Wheat cultivation - which is transported, manufactured, manufactured, marketed, distributed at far more inflated prices back to the people who live where the wheat is grown in the first place ! I have been to a cereal manufacturing facility in the US (with a brand name known to be high in nutrition and 'close to earth') - I have refused to eat any cereals since then ! - but that is a different story.

The Global assumption is that suddenly the essential food supply in the last two years has gone down. Nothing like that has happened, or at least not reported. Have people started to suddenly eat more in the last two years ? Enough to cause food riots elsewhere ? Not that I have heard. So the only variable is the manipulation of the supply chain, and the problems must lie there.

Of course as more and more agricultural land is appropriated to feed the insatiable 'appetite of the greedy' - like cash crops for making ethanol - we will face severe problems. But the rich will continue to eat while the poor will feed off their crumbs. But then what’s different ???

More serious is the serious effect of Global Warming on the availability of Water for Agriculture. In India 70 % of Agriculture depends upon our ground water. And we are running out of that at an alarming rate. As the glaciers disappear and our rivers turn into alternates between flooding and drought, the world is in for a catastrophic time. And for all our attempts at Water harvesting, nothing will change unless we look at the way food is manufactured and distributed.

And at consumption patterns.

Why are we the only species, that cannot stop consuming ? So that those that can afford it eat too much, and those that cannot, starve.

Shekhar

New Media : How are we exploring the net ?

Just added the category for New Media. Our world and the way we interact with each other is changing. Social behaviour is changing because of it. So we should be sharing points of view on it. In Asia Internet surfing is increasingly done on cell phones. It is estimated that in India 65 % of the basic internet usage is done on the cell phone. We seem to be jumping the PC technology straight into mobile technology. But in rest of Asia, for completely different reasons, the same is happening. In Korea and Japan the internet download speeds are faster than the rest of the world with more killer apps available. In the US the Iphone has spurred huge use of the interent on the mobile device. But how will this be paid for ? This is a very interesting article on the challenges faced by the Google type advertising models

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/apr2008/tc20080427_580014_page_2.htm

Faith, Prayer, Mythology,

:) says :"i am surprised that you put mythology above PRAYER and FAITH !"

faith, prayer, mythology gods and goddesses are all ways to keep going beyond your sense of the individual self - they enable you to break out of the prison of individuality, the prison of the mind, and allow something much deeper inside you to connect to something far more expansive. More expansive emotionally, more expansive instinctually , more expansive spiritually, and more expansive creatively.

We call that being in touch with expansiveness an awareness of the universal self, of being in touch with consciousness, or even being n the presence of God. So being in CONSTANT touch with either Myth, or Prayer or Faith, almost with every breath is what I am talking about. That being n constant touch is what mystics have called the 'state of being in constant and universal love'. And it is so important not to make this 'being in constant touch' become too specific.

For there is something 'breeze like' about the infinite. The more you turn it into finite ways and methods and laws, the more you try and make them logical, the more you look upon this as methodology, the more you are turning the potential, the constant whiffs of breeze, the 'presence', the attitude , the unknown emotional feelings of the spirit, into dogma and a set of rules, or a method. In those cases the very Myths you are using, the very faith and prayers you are using turn finally into rules, dogma, obsession and then excuses and weapons for destruction and conflict - as we see religious conflicts all over the world. Shekhar

Will McCain decide between Obama and Clinton ?

Have you noticed how the Democratic party has shifted from 'Between Obama and Clinton, who will be the best next President of the United States' to 'which one of them can beat McCain' ?? Senator McCain has (as I previously predicted on this blog) come in from behind and taken advantage of the political bickering between Obama and Clinton. The two are acting as if the is not a race for the Presidency of the United States, but a high school election. Personally I think the world outside would love to see Obama as the next US president- for it gives a great message that the US is going to once again open it 'liberal doors'. I would love to see Obama as president

However, given the economic situation in the US, the war in Iraq is no longer the major pre-occupation of the people of the US.....

]]> ......And I believe that McCain may just be the next President of the US. It's the word I get form the streets of New York. For McCain is being perceived as the 'less indefinite one'. But more importantly, both Obama and Clinton are running out of steam for the American people. The 'tiresome' factor is setting in. Would either of them be able to rustle up a fresh exciting new campaign for Presidency ? They will have to work extremely hard at that. For they have already fired all their guns and their political cylinders may well be empty. Can Obama relaunch his campaign of 'Change' as a fresh Presidential race ?

shekhar

Mythology and Culture : Open Forum

Where do our fundamental roots lie ? In Culture or in Mythology. Is our culture defined by our Myths, or is it the other way round ? Or is one inseparable from the other ? Can I, for example, live in completely different culture, adapt to that culture, and yet my being is incomplete with my own mythology ? I personally have been able to constantly adapt to other cultures (I am a gypsy) , but when I wake up in the morning I reconstruct myself from the night before by delving deep into my mythology. Not prayers, nor faith. Just Mythology. I guess being in NY and being part of a completely multi cultural experience in film making, where the other directors are Japanese, Chinese, Russian, French, - this questions begs discussion. Any takers ?

Are Ghosts and Spirits real ?: Filming in the presence of Anthny Minghella's Spirit

Koizen asked : you have opinions of Astrophysicist, gods, spirituality...why not Ghosts... spirits ? Koizen, I actually do not disbelieve in ghosts or spirits, nor do i subscribe to the fear factor associated with ghosts. I believe we live in the constant 'presence' of consciousness of all beings and thought, including our own consciousness too. But none of that is defined or individual. It is all interconnected and formless. However any passionate desire to 'feel' that presence will create an individuality of that presence in the form we imagine. It is not 'present' in it's individual form, till our desire, fear, passion or love creates around us that individual presence.

Take for example the filming of New York I love which I recently completed. It was the last script Anthony wrote before he died. And just before he went into hospital, he asked me if I would direct it. I was looking for guidance in the shoot. To interpret his script. To understand what he was looking for. I knew it was impossible to shoot the 7 page script in two days, but I had to achieve the impossible. In the end there is a film with some of the most beautiful images I have ever shot. In the end there is a short 13 minute film that inexplicably moves people, without being able to define the film. The only way I could have done this is by being guided by something outside me. And my belief is that I was being guided by Anthony's spirit.....

]]> .... faced with uncertainty, I actually visualized Anthony Minghella smiling and laughing at my predicament. Subconsciously I was calling upon his spirit to guide me through. And so it did. I can in all honestly say that I have no I idea why I find the film so moving.

So the question is that are we completely responsible for the decisions we take ? And the result of those decisions ? As I have often said on this website, I believe that the Universe is ultimately chaotic and not unless we embrace that chaos, are we able to come to harmony. Otherwise we live in the illusions of control.

So yes, I believe in spirits and ghosts. They are an integral part of the universe that we are integral part of. Our own spirits and our own ghosts exist at the same time we do. Ghosts and Spirits are part of universal consciousness individualized through our imagination and passion,

shekhar

left right left right, and so life marches on in two conflicting brains

As I look back at my life, I have been accused of being impractical (I am), a dreamer (I am) a wanderer (completely), the famous comment 'you treat life like it was just play' - yes I do. 'Act your age' - I can remember forever. People have said I have an over active imagination (yes, completely), that I should be more serious about life (I agree, but I do not know really know what they mean). The point I have been making is that while I have always accepted these accusations, I have lived under the burden of guilt of all these accusations. I have consistently tried to change them, but neither have I been able to change myself, nor have I been able to be free of considering myself somewhat an irresponsible human being...

]]> ... so there is something about our social system or our education that does not recognize that some of us just are completely right brain people. I am, and when I start to try and make decisions that are not emotionally based, or completely left brain decision I am so engulfed by doubt that I land up not making any decision. However if I make those very decisions from my right brain, somehow the decision making process become different. I do not somehow actively make the decisions in as much as seeing them through step by step, but if left in that space, somehow things get done without being an active participant in the doing of them.

I am not making a judgment here about the value of the right brain. But simply that is who i am and I have achieved less in my life, by not accepting my right brain tendency as a strength.

Well, it is never too late to change. To give your self to the emotionality of the right brain and the exist in it freely without doubt and with complete trust,

shekhar

Shia Lebouf, Julie christie, John Hurt in New York I love you

So I finished filming my episode and have delivered the first rough cut. When I arrived in New York just a few days before the shoot, we had no cast. But as we went through the lists almost as if by some act of destiny or magic my first choices were not only available, but also willing to fly from all over the world to come and shoot with me these two days. I think this was as much out of incredible respect for Anthony Minghella's last script as much as it was for working with me. I do ot need t say anything about the talents of actors like John Hurt and Julie Christie. They are a pleasure to work with and have consistently performed outstandingly over the years. With John Hurt it was a double pleasure as we became incredibly good friends when we were both n the jury of the Marrakech Film Festival. But the surprise was Shia Lebouf...

]]> I walked into his hotel in NY ready to pitch him the script, ready to try and persuade him to do the part. Afetr all he is being heralded as the next huge Hollywood star ! But imagine my surprise when he walked in, shook my hand, and proceeded to pay the character. He had been rehearsing the character for three hours even before I got there.

Siha is a focussed, intelligent and thinking actor. Everyone who saw the film were completely taken by his performance - and I am not going to give things away by talking about it. The film should be out soon.

Benoit Debie, the wonderful DP from Belgium (remember Irreversible ?) was my DP and my good friend Antonio Pinto is landing tomorrow to score the music (City of God).

I have throughly enjoyed making this film. So much that I would really make a few shorts more. It is fun trying to tell a whole story in such a short space of time. We had a hard two day shoot in NY - but I oved the crew. i think this is the first really independant film I making in the West and the crew are so different from the ones that work in mainstream Hollywood cinema. It was great experience and I really like the film myself too. It helped having a script by Anthony Minghella though. I really look forward to making some more short films. All segemnst are required to be under 6/7 minutes, But mine is based on a script that is the last script written by Anthony Minghella before he passed away, so we decided to be true to his vision. My film is about 12 minutes long.

Other directors include Scarlett Johannson, Mira nair, Bret Rattner, Fatih Akin (turkish but brought up in Germany), Natalie Portman, Shunji Iwa (japan), Wen Jiang (china) etc

Priyanka visits Rajiv Gandhi assasination accused in prison

I was really surprised and would say moved when I read the Priyanka Vadera ( nee Gandhi) went to visit Nalini in prison- one of the accused in the assasination of Rajiv Gandhi. I have never met Priyanka nor do I know what transpired except that Nalini has made statements of how much she now respects the Gandhi family. Apparently Sonia Gandhi herself had asked for clemency against the death sentence on Nalini because of her (then) five year old baby. Priyanka apparently went to get closure for herself on her father's tragic and brutal death. I guess I find this act of forgiveness and redemption not only very moving, but also that there was absolutely no attempt to make political capital of this visit from India's most political family.

Water Film Festival : support it if you can please

Dear Shekhar
I have been volunteering as project co-ordinator for an international water film festival titled Voices From the Waters. The first edition was held in Bangalore in 2005. The second was held in June last year and it is still continuing as a travelling film festival across cities, small towns and institutions across the country. It has been concieved as a platform without any defined boundaries celebrating the blue gold and building awareness. The next edition of the festival is scheduled for September 2008. I have attatched below the call for entries. We would be extremely grateful if you could help spread the word or even offer us suggestions for the festival.
Please refer to the website http://voicesfromthewaters.com/ or any further information. It would be great for any help you could offer.best of luck,
peace,
siddharth

hey mr. time man

hey mr time man
i got your number
i took away your sickle
and pulled off your hood
and found myself
staring back at me

wanna dance
mr time man ?

Larry King and the how to live longer. How about just play ?

Happened to catch bits of the Larry King show last night on how to live longer. My friend Deepak Chopra was on it - though he did not seem to get too much of a chance to speak. The one thing no one mentioned was community. That people that live in harmonious communities, or fulfilling relationships have healthier immune systems. Deepak did mention the idea of toxicity being not just about pollutants, but also how relationships can also be toxic. There is enough research now to show that loneliness is a great cause of loss of immune system and therefore the onset of disease. In modern society though, we see isolation almost as a pedigree to success. Almost masculine.

For those of us that come from in India, remember the word 'Mehfil' ? I remember my boyhood being spent on my bicycle going to friends houses and shouting at their windows to come and play. Play. That is what keeps harmony in communities. Play is what keeps relationships together. Play is how we defuse stress and tensions. Play is what keeps the immune system alive and healthy.

Time, love, eternity, is 'emotional time' real time ?

The perceptions of time change so much even though we believe that 'time' is fixed. For the greatest measurement of time seems to be our life spans. And ageing. We even call what happens to our bodies as we age the 'ravages of time' as if time was this train that chugs along at it's unchangeable pace, and everything seems to revolve around that pace. And yet we keep trying to slow down that train, hoping that we will age slower. In fact by living healthier (or trying to !). And often because we savour the situations we are in and never want them go away. And often blame time for those anticipations and situations for going away. So time at best is a perception that is based on the situation we percieve we are in, or how healthy we feel. Time sits so heavily when we are depresesed for example, we say. So why do we give time an 'actuality' like a precise ticking clock that reminds us of it's tick tock every second. Imbibe upon time a 'a law pf physics' that is completely unchangeable, but every moment are perceiving time completely differently depending upon the current state of our minds.

Did you say to anyone that you will love them forever ? My guess is that if you really felt it, and if your being was engulfed into that one statement - then you really did sense the the word we call eternity. I have loved you through eternity and will love you eternally. Suddenly all perception of time for that moment has disappeared. The clock does not tick any more. In the holding of that one hand, in the harmonizing of the two breaths, eternity has been sensed.

So where are we at those moments ? ......

]]> As a child on holiday with my family in the Himalayan mountains, a one month's vacation break was a lifetime for me. But now seem to have lost the ability to lose myself timelessly in play - one month is just one month - a measurement of time available to me. Why do we value ourselves in the context of the ticking clock ? Is it social imperative ? Have we been taught to do that ? Or is it instinctive. People who live less rushed lives find a whole eternity in watching a sunset. What led us to this situation ?

And if time is about perception, which time is true ? The clicking clock or what I call - emotional time. How many of us keep falling into emotional time and then feel guilty and remind ourselves about the ticking clock. I know the argument will be - but what about ageing ?

Lets look at ageing from the law of physics. Einstein famously said that the greater your velocity the slower time goes. But which time ? If you were sitting in a space ship that travelled close to the velocity of light, you would probably age only imperceptibly. But from which context ? From who's context ? You would still be living in your emotional time. If you took a clock, the clock would move exactly at the same speed as your percived linear time in the space ship. You would still look at that extra grey strand in your hair and say to yourself ' oh my God ! time is really catching up !" - even though, according to Einstein, to the people that you left behind on earth, you would practically be eternal.

Incidentally, I have always wondered what would happen (theoretically, even) if we could make a connection between the people left on earth and you in a space ship travelling close to the velocity of light - my guess is that any message from earth to you would be garbled undecipherable jumble of noise. Because the dots and the dashes would be too bunched together for you to be able to perceive. So nothing changed in terms of time did it ? Imagine that we became almost immortal - imagine that we lived 1000 years - we wold look at our diaries and say 'Oh my God ! I have so much to do this month - 3 lunch appointments ! I wuld write a blog every 10 years and consider that too much. Everything is contextualized in relationship to how we perceive time.

So, then Mr Einstien, is there a possibility of a universe that exists within ours, or near us, that has such velocity that it feels static and almost eternal ? Ah that word again - eternal ! I love you eternally - how do I get into that sense of eternity then ?

So we have such different perceptions of time - both from a scientific point of view and also from an emotional/perception point of view. Why do we do ourselves such a disfavour by contextualizing it (and therefore ourselves) by a ticking clock ?

And what happens if the person in the spaceship - who according to Mr Einstein refuses to grow older from OUR time perspective - but perceives himself in exactly the same 'time bind' as we do - what happens if he crosses the velocity of light ? Does time stop ? is that the realization of Eternity ? Will that person suddenly explode into consciousness ? what does 'no time' mean from a physics point of view ? All theories break at that point - for then there was no begining and no end. The Big Bang is still happening. Has happened and will happen - depending upon which point of view you are looking at it.

The point then is - if time is just perception, then do we need to travel at the speed of light to break out of our linear perceptions ? for at the end of Mr Einstein's theories there is incredible stillness. And if there is - does that stillness not exist at the same time as linear time ?

Is the experience of this stillness what Buddha called Shunyata ? A mmoment beyond the mind"s addiction to linearity of time ? is this falling in love so deeply and compassionately without a need for possession, that all perception of time falls away ? Is this meditation, and finally :

Is this the experience God ?

And if it is, and time truly is a perception and not just a definitive linear reality - then we are both dead and alive at the same time - we live both in eternity and in trapped by linear time at the same moment in time. Depends upon our perception. Thats why, just be in love. Not in love in some acquisitive way, but so deeply in love that you break through all structures and strictures,

and learn to live in emotional time,

shekhar