A hotel room with a tiny hole in the blanket, 34° C - 26° C temperature range, general
sense of pointlessness, 65% humidity, bucket load of sweat, movies, head ache
inducing sun, head ache, unaccounted money given to auto rickshaws, K B Ganesh
Kumar-abuse (the state minister for Forests, Sports and Cinema), Chalachitra
Academy-abuse, Cafeteria-abuse, and slightly awkward meet ups with old acquaintances
– These pretty much sum up my this year’s experience at the 16th International
Film festival of Kerala held from Dec. 9 to 16 in Trivandrum.
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Unlike the years before, I wasn’t overwhelmed by the idea of
being a part of a film festival attended by 9K delegates or the crowd or the
selection of movies.
Repetitiveness took a toll from the moment Shashi Tharoor did
the same trick to impress the crowd at the IFFK inauguration, as he had been
doing for the past two years. He has this habit to welcoming people on the dais, in
their mother tongues, thus displaying his ability to speak in languages ranging
from Malayalam to Bengali to Spanish, which of course is impressive. But if you
hear it for the third year, at the same annual gathering, I don’t know, it
sounds gay.
Jaya Bachchan, who inaugurated the festival, was almost
unbelievably stupid with the last 3 minutes of her 5-minute speech focusing on
her new-born granddaughter (she said she had to go home immediately because a
three-week baby was waiting for her).
The Kathakali performance, which followed the inauguration
of the festival, presenting Mahabharat in a nutshell, was unbearable due to the
loud noise and the redundancy of the epic we are forced to read and hear and watch
through books and movies and television, and now IFFK.
Since the academy ran short of booklets containing synopsis
of movies, on the first day, I had to watch 2 or 3 movies without any information,
which means, I ended up watching movies which made absolutely no sense to me.
Surprisingly the 'high point' of my movie-watching this year occurred
in a movie titled “You Are Here” by Daniel Cockburn, which I couldn’t even
finish watching due to its incomprehensibility. But there was this section in
the movie "The Chinese Room," which was
extremely brilliant and hilarious that I suddenly felt a bit of
intellectual-blood rush through my veins!
The books help him solve the puzzle through meticulously written algorithms:
Example Step # 1: If the first letter looks like 漢字, go to Step # 108. If it doesn't, go to Step #2.
And this sort of thing continues throughout the volumes.
Finally the guy finds an answer in Chinese, though he has no
idea what it means.
Anand Rajaram explains the ‘Chinese Room’ experiment in the movie.
Fortunately I could locate it on YouTube.
Also, my photograph appeared in first page of Kerala Kaumudi
City Edition, the second instance of my flatteringly-prominent newspaper appearance
during IFFK. Just to feel good, here is the pdf :) (By the way, I'm not in the crowd, so scroll down a little bit).
