vivek agnihothri

A journalist pursued the French writer Albert Camus to ask him to explain his work in detail. The author of “The Plague" refused with the words: "I write, others judge whatever way they want to."

But the journalist would not give up. One afternoon he managed to find him in a Paris café.

"The critics think that you never touch on anything deep," said the journalist. "I would like to ask you something: if you had to write a book about society, would you accept the challenge?"

"Of course," answered Camus. "The book would have a hundred pages. Ninety-nine would be blank, because there is nothing to say. At the end of the hundredth page I would write: "man’s only duty is to love."

For last few months, I’ve been writing, writing, rewriting and rewriting my next film. But every time I get to lock the script, something inside stops me. ‘Is this really what I want to say?’ or ‘Does anyone care?’, ‘Is there anything which I know and others don’t?’

I feel we live in an already congested world. Its an over-communicated and over congested society. Rounds of chain mails, often repeated jokes, tired power-point spirituality, stale news, over exaggerations, shorter tempers, enlarged egos, increasing hard disc memory and shrinking human memory, over dependence on gadgetry, lacking self confidence, internal hollowness and over dependence on gym driven cosmetic beauty, losing sex appeal and obscenely visble cleavages, SMS, email, blogs, Facebooks, orkuts blackberries etc. have taken over a deep-meaningful, inter-personal communication. The beautifully crafted love letters shall be found only in Sotheby’s. My children will never know the art of writing a letter. These issues have been bothering me for many years. Do we really need al this?

I grew up in a world-of- choices’. There were few basic options and one could chose between them easily. Like, between HT or TOI? Between Fiat or Ambassador? Between Nainital or Mussourie? Today, we are living in a ‘world-of-avoidance’. Where one spends greater energy avoiding or resisting information. Try to calculate in your mind how many ‘personal loan’ calls, how many spams, how many sms’s you end up deleting everyday. (What about people with two mobiles?) Look around and see how we are in a swamp of ads, hoardings, commercials. All around us there is an aggressive message waiting to influence you. So much of written and spoken word. So much of entertainment. So much to see, to copy, to download and upload.

It’s a clutter. Out there. And I really wonder should I still make yet another movie or write another blog in this clutter.

But as they say, nothing is never gonna change.

Despite all the inventions, we still say ‘I love you’.

Love.

VA

An angry housekeeper who arrived and found a disastrously messy house said to the producer who owned it, “There’s shit everywhere.”

The producer said to her, “There’s shit all over the world.”