*From To Sathish* - Thread 3 - Page 79

Wow. Nice collection of songs.
Thanks for sharing such wonderful, nostalgic memories of the 90s.
I'm a 90s kid and I've grown up listening to melodies sung by Kumar Sanu, Alka Yagnik and Udit Narayanan. Many of their songs were chartbusters during that time which helped to boost up the careers of today's superstars.
Looking back now and listening to those songs makes me realise that the 90s was the last era of music in Bollywood before it lost its innocence forever - in terms of soulful melodies, meaningful lyrics and old-world romance.

I was watching the teaser song of "Dear Zindagi" in the modern version of "Aye zindagi gale laga le" with Alia and Shahrukh...
it immediately took me back to the original Ilaiyaraja song from "Sadma" (which was actually remade from a Tamil tune) almost 33 years ago.
And man, the original song sounds just as fresh to the ears!
Plus it is one of those many songs picturised on Kamalhassan and Sridevi where they complemented each other so beautifully...WITHOUT showing a glimpse of romance in their acting or in their eyes!
That's really hard and almost impossible to do for this current generation of actors...
It's these small nuances which make old songs so heavenly and fresh to listen to even today.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aVw1gZ9Ncg

Fat To Fit Aamir Khan Body Transformation | Dangal

most will say that he did it for film and money and will forget that he actually did it and forget that at the age 52 he gains and loses weight not because he is special or gifted with super human powers but will power and hard work which sadly has become the domain of supermen. He can do it,you can do it and so can everyone and all they have to do is believe and just do it.simple and yet so tough.Go Aamir.

Difference between Sympathy and Empathy!

Sympathetic, fine but better still, be EMPATHIC: Difference between Sympathy and Empathy is, sympathy is a feeling of kindness you have for others but empathy is a step further when you feel as others are feeling. Empathy is about sharing their woes. Empathic people are quick to realize the true feelings of others and would like to help or want to do whatever they can to alleviate their suffering. They are truly understanding, deeply o...bservant and can listen to what has gone unsaid, can see what is being hidden. They are the friends or relations who, at the first sight, can smell that everything is not right, in spite of the person saying it is. Because of their sincerity and eagerness to help, they, ultimately, find the truth.

Empathic people are friends in need, with whom you can share your true feelings and ask for counsel or advice. Because of their sincerity, they shall give the best advice possible themselves or will not hesitate to ask someone else known to them for advice, who they think, might be knowing better. They are totally trustworthy, open-hearted, dependable and faithful. They are always available for you, least assuming, always truthful calling spade, a spade, come what may. They have a mind of their own. Such persons generally avoid crowd because they are rare and far between. They know that life is a marathon, not a sprint. Hence their advice, even if not appearing to hold good in the short term, but is always sound one, for the long term.

Three Poems from Robert Frost on Choices and a lovely explanation of them by Lata Jagtiani

Poem No 1:

The Road Not Taken
Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I"
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.



---

Poem No. 2:

The second poem in the trilogy on the subject of making choices is this beauty from Frost:


Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

==

Poem No. 3
The third Robert Frost poem in the series on making choices:


THE ARMFUL

For every parcel I stoop down to seize
I lose some other off my arms and knees,
And the whole pile is slipping, bottles, buns,
Extremes too hard to comprehend at. once
Yet nothing I should care to leave behind.
With all I have to hold with~ hand and mind
And heart, if need be, I will do my best.
To keep their building balanced at my breast.
I crouch down to prevent them as they fall;
Then sit down in the middle of them all.
I had to drop the armful in the road
And try to stack them in a better load.





In Stopping BY Woods On A Snowy Evening, there are two personalities, one is the poet whose natural inclination is to dream, to stop, to wonder, to be lost in time, the one who just wants "to be." The second character is the horse who is the symbol of the man with common concerns, the practical person who is always "doing" something, moving forward. The two personalities are essentially the two states of mind in all of us, one wants to stop, and just be and the other keeps nidging the dreamer in us to stop this nonsense and get real and get busy.

The woods, of course, are nature and every once in a while we stop dead in our tracks to really take it all in. But the horse...he asks us to move on, don't stop, there is so much to do...

Whose woods these are, I think, I know...his house is in the village though...the one who owns all this beauty will not mind our peeking into his beautiful world...in some ways it could also represent God, who is, I guess, elsewhere...

To enter into someone else's enchanted world is to enjoy a kind of stolen, almost guilty, pleasure which is what Frost appears to be enjoying, if one looks at the poem very superficially...at heart, the poem is the conflict of the "to be" and the "to do." Frost is actually weighing in on the side of the stopper because he is really living, and the last repetition of the miles to go before I sleep is an almost mantra-like repetition of the line as if one has to struggle hard to convince oneself that the correct way of living is by "doing" and not by "Being." But the poem is about "Being" and its beauties, and not about "doing" and its beauties...

The poet decides to heed the practical part of his mind, and bows his head to the horse's nudging him on; and yet the wistfulness stays, he has glimpsed eternity in those woods, he has been one with the Infinite and yet he moves back into the impermanent, leaving behind the eternal. He makes the choice we make most of the time, as we turn our backs on the Real and choose the Unreal, choosing the mundane over the ethereal.

The last poem is the least quoted of the three poems on the theme of making choices...but it's a short poem and has nothing to do with forests or woods. Its not a narrative poem as such, it's not a walk through snow or nature...it's merely about a person trying hard to keep everything he values together in his life, an effort on his part to ensure he doesn't lose sight of his priorities, and sometimes he finds himself over-weighed with his concerns (bottles, buns) and some of these even consist of "extremes too hard to comprehend, at once."

The interesting word here employed by Frost is "extremes." My own take on this is that he is talking about various people who come into our lives and who stay on and others are perplexed as to how could one associate with these two/three extreme personalities, for e.g. how could one have a crazy eccentric or weird person as a friend while at the same time associating with very brilliant people who are balanced? Extremes too hard to comprehend at once" leads to sometimes one letting drop one in order not to lose the other, and yet the effort to keep them all carries on, because each is invaluable in its own way.

"I had to drop the armful in the road

And try to stack them in a better load."

These two lines are the resolution: no matter how hard you may try to hold something to your "breast" things fall and one loses one's grip. At that point, Man lets everything go, lets it fall, he included, and this is the crisis point which Frost is sharing with us. At this crisis there is no option but to let it all drop, let oneself drop as well...and then calmly slowly "try to" arrange one's life and priorities in such a manner that they may not become unmanageable, with things more important closer to the breast and so on.

Thus, all three poems deal with choices made, priorities in one's life. In the first poem the poet has to choose a life-altering path, and decides to answer the call of his inner being and goes for the path which may not appeal to others but is one's own inclination; in the second poem the conflict between the practical man and the spiritual being is resolved with the practical side of oneself taking the front-seat at the wheel; in the third poem which appears to me like the natural progression of thought, the priorities chosen sometimes overwhelm one, one's life throws up too many challenges and one has to collapse, one has to let go, and then one has to re-build carefully so another crisis may be prevented.

Frost's dilemma is the poet's dilemma, the poet's nightmare too: should he choose the calling of remaining a poet( taking the road not taken, for instance) or should he do something more lucrative which will offer less difficulties( taking the beaten path, etc)? Should one be practical and go, like the horse that shakes his bells, go towards a life of "doing" as against a life of "being"? And then one needs to also concern oneself with having too much on one's plate, trying to be all things to everyone, trying to hug everything close with the result that everything falls, collapses, and one collapses with the concerns; and having dropped everything and one's self, one then slowly picks up the pieces and tries to re-arrange one's life so a similar debacle does not recur.

A post i posted in this forum in may 2009.god,how time flies




THE STRENGTH OF A MOTHER

Last week coming out of the Shiva temple near my house in besantnagar i saw this very old lady pushing a man who was obviously paralysed in a cart.i stopped thinking i would give her the bananas and coconut i was carrying from the puja i had done.as she came near she became very excited and hurriedly pushed the cart towards me.seeing this i thought that she must be coming towards me to beg for money.but wonders of wonders she left the car and came near me and stared for some time and then asked me if i was the actor who was acting in kalyanam.sheepishly i said yes and then gave her a 5 rupee not and tried to move because she was smelling badly.but she kept trying to make polite conversation and amazingly tried to her hands for she had lost most of her fingers due to leprosy.standing politely but not knowing what to talk to her i asked her if that was her husband in the cart she was pushing.smilingly she said that it was her son who was born paralysed.shocked i asked her how old they both were.she said she was nearing seventy and that her son was nearly 55 years old.speechless i asked her when she got married and where her husband was.shyly she said that it was a mistake she did when she was about 14 or 15 years old.she had given birth to a handicapped son and had been caring for him even while suffering from leprosy for so long.

Not knowing how to react i took my wallet out and tried to give all the money which was there.but she stopped and said i would be more happy if you came and visited the rest of us in our leper colony near vyasarpadi.mumbling yes i walked,ran and raced my car from there.lying in bed i thought what a coward i was and am still for there have been so many times i gave up hope when faced with petty problems.but after this i have sworn to look at life in a more positive way and accept everything as god's desire and will.

Long ago and i mean nearly 4,000 years ago


I have this capacity,a side of me that goes blank and when i mean blank it means i shut my senses to the outside world and let in only the most vital and important information and that somehow is processed and well i operate,barely.

In this state and it is regardless where i am in,at work shooting,among people,eating,watching tv and also reading that i shut shop and let my mind drift away to a different world,a plane,a realm where i and only my wild imagination co-exist.This happens when i am sad,happy,lonely and miss someone terribly and so it means it can happen anytime.

Wonderful and beautiful thoughts translate into stories and poems and all it takes is to read something and immediately my mind latches on to the things which the writer did not feel or dwell on and from there i take over and travel on.

But all that aside,have you all ever wondered what the first story could have been or the situation in which the first story teller might have told his story and how it might have been received.I bet either they praised him and raised him or simply razed him and erased him.

Through the millenium and through dust,decay and destruction comes one story that is now widely accepted by everyone as the first story to be written down,documented and most importantly that which has survived and it is called the The Epic of Gilgamesh.

The Epic of Gilgamesh recounts a king's struggle with his fear of death, and his foolish quest for immortality. However, as the epic makes clear, Gilgamesh will be remembered for rebuilding the city's walls on their antediluvian foundations, and restoring the temples of the gods. This realization and how it comes about is the nucleus of the story. It encapsulates Gilgamesh's journey from impetuous youth to wise king. He learns his place in the great scheme of things, finding wisdom




Over a thousand years before the Old Testament and the Odyssey, an unknown author composed the first enduring story in the history of mankind. The Epic of Gilgamesh was written on clay tablets in the cuneiform writing style of ancient Sumer (modern Iraq) over four thousand years ago.

Two parts god and one part man, Gilgamesh is thought to have ruled over the city-state of Uruk around 2750 B.C. His story is a mixed journey of perilous endeavors and acquired wisdom, but it also includes a number of familiar myths such as the Great Flood and the original Noah.

Primarily, the epic is a window into the desires and troubles that immersed the thoughts of a semi-divine Sumerian king. More than just a tale of heroism, it is the story of Gilgamesh's path to wisdom and maturity; the benefits of civilization over savagery, and a lesson for future kings to fulfill their sacred and mundane duties. Perhaps the most pervasive theme is Gilgamesh's fear of death, a perennial concern that is as salient today as it was thousands of years ago.


The history of the written word

The oldest works of writing were not tales of great kings, nor were they mythological stories about the gods. During the Neolithic age of mankind (12,000 to 5,000 years ago), agriculture allowed our species to transition from hunter-gatherers to settled farmers. Temples dedicated to the gods doubled as centres of commerce and prosperity, where the surrounding land was allotted to prestigious farmers. As these settlements grew into towns and cities it became increasingly difficult for temple managers to remember the division of land and wealth. Writing developed as a means to keep records, reducing the growing number of disputes between wealthy individuals. The first literate humans were accountants!


The discovery of Gilgamesh

The age of writing is a distant descendant of the human imagination, and once poets and bards began to immortalize their work, a literary revolution followed. Verbally recounted stories grew into epic compositions, with each successive generation building on the exploits of the last.

The Epic of Gilgamesh began as a collection of poems 4,000 years ago, and grew into the standard version 1,000 years later. It was originally called "Surpassing all other kings" and later became "He who saw the Deep", epitomizing Gilgamesh's pursuit of wisdom. This standard version was compiled by Sin-liqe Unninni, an exorcist who's name means "Oh Moon God, Accept My Prayer!". Archaeologists have managed to piece together this version from 73 different sources that were discovered in Iraq and other Middle Eastern locations over the past 150 years. Many of the cuneiform clay tablets that provide us with the epic were copied by students learning the Sumerian or Akkadian languages. Those children probably never would have imagined the part they'd play in preserving the epic for such distant posterity.

Despite the continuing work of archaeologists and assyriologists, the most recent compilation of the epic only has 80% of its 3,000 lines intact. This Penguin Classics version comes with a lengthy introduction describing the history of the Sumerian civilization and the quest to recover the clay tablets from Iraq. It is best to avoid this introduction until after the story as it is quite the spoiler! Furthermore, prior to each chapter is a summary of events. It is best to ignore this completely, as it is not required to understand the text.



The Epic of Gilgamesh


The youthful Gilgamesh is a restless, pugnacious, and tyrannical leader. He terrorizes his people by intimidating and challenging the young men of Uruk, and letting no girl go free to her bridegroom. Gilgamesh is described as a "wild bull on the rampage", the "tall, magnificent, and terrible", unsleeping, charming, happy, carefree, handsome by earthly standards, and having "no equal when his weapons are brandished". However, rather than winning trophies and prestige; he gains wisdom and sagacity. He learns "the sum of wisdom. He saw what was secret, discovered what was hidden".

The people of Uruk complained about the restless Gilgamesh to the god Anu, who restored peace by creating a wild man to be his companion and equal. The magnificent Enkidu delights in the beasts of the wild, roaming the planes and pulling up hunter's traps. In another rarity of ancient literature, a harlot is sent to tame him, resulting in quite a graphic sexual encounter. The tragedy of Enkidu's loss of innocence is a unique and moving journey from savage to "civilized" being.

When Enkidu travels to Uruk, he challenges and fights Gilgamesh, spawning a mutual respect and a deep friendship. What follows are the more traditional deeds of ancient heroes. Together they slay beasts and ogres, and offend the gods before tragedy befalls them. Gilgamesh then begins his quest for the elixir of immortality, wandering the wild with anger and despair in his heart: "When may the dead see the rays of the sun?"

Contrasting more recent epics, our hero can be cruel, and he can lose his courage. When Gilgamesh's dreams betray his optimism, Enkidu interprets them as favourable omens to give his friend courage. When the stature of his foes imbues his heart with fear, Enkidu is again on hand to boost morale.

Gilgamesh's restless impatience follows him to the ends of the Earth, hindering his progress, and striking fear into those who may help him. Upon reaching his destination, he discloses his original intent to engage his teacher in combat to extract the secret he desires. The wise Uta-Napishti quells his anger and ends his quest with the revelations he imparts.

Bring a box of tissues

Na,honest to god i have never carried a box of tissues into a movie hall nor have i reached for one while seated in the comforts my own bedroom.But i confess that in the past and now in the present when the past is replayed i do tend to get bleary eyed and yes they my eyes tend to brim with tears.

But two scenes,one the climax scene from Braveheart and the other one is the climax scene from Forrest gump and maybe we can sneak in the scene where forrest gump sees his son for the first time and remember that forrest gump is slightly slow or konjam bulbu weak.


' jenny,you are a mama'

' i am a mama,his name is forrest'

'like me'

' i named him after his dad'

' he got a dad named forrest'

' you are his dad forrest'

' isn't he beautiful'

' he is the most beautiful thing i have ever seen'

' but is he smart,i mean not like me'

' he is the smartest kid in his class'

and well the tears come and they come every time i see this scene.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hlx2Jr-oG0


The first time i saw braveheart was with a gang of my rowdy friends and although they didnt understand english much they followed the film very well as did most of the audience and then just like that at the climax scene mel gibson delivers the killer punch as we see william wallace scream " freedom" and turns his neck for the sword and then sees his dead wife in his dying moments.

most of my friends were sobbing and ramesh and shankar in unison 'enna satishu,alluva vuttanepa.che,emba,paavam pollaika uttruka kudatha.'

The scene,the slow motion shots and most importantly the music is a killer combination.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00tN0IHvlVw


well,what can one say about Tom hanks and his beautiful acting in the last scene as he watches jenny die and then he talks to her at her grave site.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFvASiMTDz0