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My fingers have been itching to post something since the last week. I am extremely happy for Roger winning FO 2009. I completed the Twilight series. I could not keep them down. Edward Cullen is my favorite character. I have been a lot into orkut and facebook these days. No wonder every one prefers Facebook to Orkut. It keeps your info more secure. I have just seen a community of a friend with a thread “Do the world require John Galt/ Howard Roark more?” I really wonder what good they will be to the modern world or it is better the other way around. Do we need them or they need us? They won`t run some charity shows for the public. They are businessmen. What do we need them for? Galt will find an Atlantis for all Hank Reardens who desert their families and divorce their wives. Okay, your mother and brother may not give you credit for what you do and may not love you for the right reasons. But does that mean you should leave them to the dogs? After all, you share that common liquid, forgot the name, has a pH of 7.2, with them. So if you are a desperate mother or a good-for-nothing brother, do not wish for Galt.

Do you think Roark is any better? It is damn generous of the Indian Government to build houses for the poor if it does. And then this guy Roark will come up and blast them apart just because they are lifeless. May be if he subscribes to the cause of collective good, we can take him into our brotherhood. And can we, who are made to say “acharyadevobhava”, take up Roark who talks to the dean in such an arrogant manner? We should take easy on them though they are in the wrong. It is in the human tendency to make mistakes. We should think that the elders always keep our best interests in their mind no matter how dumb they are.  It is pretty obvious as to what extent the society deserves  Roark and Galt.

I have been following RGV on his blog. It is interesting. This is what he had to say about most influential person in his life.

“Many times people ask me on when exactly my thinking took a certain turn and the answer for that is when a guy called Satyendra came into my life who undoubtedly is the most intelligent and knowledgeable man I have ever met in my life. He was 2 years younger to me and my junior at Siddhartha Engineering College in Vijayawada. I was doing Civil engg. And he was in the Mechanical branch.

He was a voracious reader and after reading he used to analyze the book and the author with such intrinsic depth and detail that one would understand everything from what caused the author to write the book to its failings and what it would do to different individuals depending upon their individual sensibilities.

Not only the students but even the lecturers at the college used to be scared of his intelligence. I could literally see the tension on their faces whenever Satyendra raised his hand to ask a question.

He used to come to college in hawai chappals, sit in the last bench, borrow a paper torn from a fellow student’s book and scribble some points of the ongoing lecture. He used to leave the class abruptly once he felt he got the point of the lecture or if he felt that the lecturer was incapable of delivering it and he would rather read it in the relevant book. I have seen him reading text books with as much ease as one would read a fiction novel. His interests were unimaginably varied and very intense. I used to feel that I knew a little about at least cinema but he knew and understood cinema many times more deeper than me and cinema was just one of his many many interests. He was the guy who introduced me to the teachings of the various philosophers starting from Plato, Emanuel Kant, Descartes, Schopenhauer, Ayan Rand and of-course Friedrich Nietzsche. He used to talk about those philosophers to me as if they were kids. I surely believed it at that time and believe that now too that Satyendra was more intelligent than all of them not necessarily because it was true but it’s because his understanding of them was far greater than mine and hence I couldn’t question Satyendra’s observations on them and their thoughts. So for all practical purposes he was higher than them for me.

He always used to see everything beyond the obvious. Both of us one day went to see a film called “Coma” based on a medical thriller written by Robin Cook. There was a scene in the film where the leading lady gets trapped in a cold storage with dead bodies hung in plastic sheets. Everybody who saw the film including me was terrified at the plight of the girl. But Satyendra talked about the dead bodies, on who they might have been as individuals. They would have laughed, cried and had their own dreams but now they are all reduced as mere props so as to invoke fear. So in reality he said the tragedy is more on the dead bodies than on the girl.

On another occasion we went to see a film called “Papillon” and in the interval we bumped into out college Principal. Satyendra told him he was watching the film for the 7th time. The Principal said that he didn’t find anything that great in the film to which Satyendra said that obviously he saw something in it which the Principal could not. To this the Principal said if he were so observant that he could see something no one else could see where is the need to see it 7 times, to which Satyendra replied “Why do you make love to your wife every day?”

Much later after his retirement that Principal wrote an article for a magazine “The one student I will never forget” based on his interactions with Satyendra.

When I was doing a project on building a residential colony for industrial personnel for my final year, I requested Satyendra to write a foreword for it. He just took a paper and pen started writing without thinking for a second. I still remember the first paragraph which goes something like this.

“Ever since the first quiverings of life animated a lifeless lump of clay it has been a biological imperative for every creature to seek shelter… shelter from the elements and shelter from the predators. Though in the animal world it remained more or less at an instinctive level, in humans it evolved into a complex form”.

Obviously my four years association with Satyendra and my understanding of him cannot be encompassed in this one article, not to forget I am still not sure whether I had or have the capacity to fully understand his brilliance. At best I could recognize it and I tried to feed on it.

After finishing college we were out of touch not by my choice but because he got bored with me. Years later when I was shooting for a film in his town, I tried to trace him as I came to know he left his home a few years earlier. I found him in a windowless room filled with all kinds of books. His eyes were filled with boredom which made me realize that he got saturated with knowledge and intelligence, and as a result there was no more excitement in his life

My relationship with him varied between admiration, awe and fear. I feared him mostly in the old times because I was insanely jealous of his brilliance and was angry that he could make me feel like a nobody.

Now I fear him because I have seen the negative effects of his brilliance. He is bored to death of everything and everyone in life and hence almost as good as dead. His eyes were unseeing when I met him last and I could see his mind was not responding as he cannot relate to any of the stuff that common people like me get excited about, and as a result he cut himself off from the world. The greatest thing that happened to my life was that he had a few conversations with me which changed my life, and the greatest fear he put in me is that, because of what happened with him, I realized that there can be actually such a thing as too much intelligence.

For all those who believe that Howard Roarks do no exist in the real world I want to tell them that “they do” and that I met and interacted with one. If Satyendra was Howard Roark in Fountainhead, I am not even a Peter Keating or Ellsworth Toohey. I am just a guy who tried to study and understand him… and I think I understood a little.”

Leaving the serious part here, I would turn to more general things. I find Idli sambar mouth-watering these days. Some of the items I have found to my liking are Veg Peshawari, Egg Kolhapuri and Mutton seekh kabab. Food in Mumbai is delicious if you know the right place to go.

I saw Pista and Angels&Demons. The latter was disappointing. The final ambigram was a big letdown. The crucial part of the story was removed. There was nothing good about the movie except the background music, architecture and Ayelet Zurer. Pista was a typical Vishal movie aimed at providing entertainment to the front benches and livelihood to the fighters. Shriya was gorgeous in some scenes.

P.S.1. If a girl was not offended by a P.S of a previous post, I will be surprised.

P.S.2. Wish Roger gets his 15th next month!

P.S.3. Dhoni`s luck starts wearing off!!

P.S.4. The facebook quiz “How well do you know X” seems inconsistent. He claims he sleeps at 4 AM.

P.S.5. Thummi is reading novels!! That is a surprise to me!!

P.S.6. Paolini, don`t keep us waiting. Finish the Inheritance Cycle.

P.S.7. Going for a shave every week is pretty weird for me.