What a way to begin the year!
Watched PK, Boyhood and attended a workshop on Beekeeping all within a single week.
Rajkumar Hirani is a peddler of sentiment - take an issue close to your heart, give it a spin, throw in the guy you least expect as the lead, pack enough choking scenes at clever interval and voila you get a surefire winner at the box office, Hirani style. 500 crores and still counting! I liked PK for its humour and that is it. Religious banality forms the basis of his latest outing and Amir Khan the super cool Alien makes it tick big time. Even Munnabhai plays a cameo!!
I watched this movie at a time when media was speculating that PK would be banned shortly if religious forces had their way. The day after I watched the movie, I attended a Beekeeping workshop in which a Christian Professor explained the way super intelligent bees communicated the location of food source to fellow worker bees by specific dance movements. In front of this prof., I found seated, a gentleman with his green cap + religious attire and another gentleman in saffron with a big red dot in his forehead literally sitting next to each other and enjoying the fascinating story of bee dance by sharing chuckles like kids. Contrary to the perception PK paints, I couldn't stop wondering the religious harmony that exists between so many religions in India and only in India! This IS reality and PK is, well, just a movie!
Richard Linklater creates magic of a different kind every time he ventures out to make a 'slice of life' movie. Unlike his previous outings which explored human relationship in the form of a couple (same couple) and their musings in a single night/day/evening picked at 9 year intervals, the canvas for Boyhood is quite big - 12 years big that is! He shows the way life and times evolve for a bunch of people (a boy in particular) over a period of 12 years by taking a peak at yearly intervals capturing random moments and weaving a superb 'coming of age' movie out of it. Just imagine somebody funding a 12 year project with conviction, in the age of 'here and now', which may/may not bomb at the box office! He got exactly such people to produce this epic and the result is three Golden Globes today (Best Director, Best Drama and Best Supporting Actress) and maybe some Oscars in a short while.
I don't get enough of this movie and plan to watch it again (and maybe again!).
What has it got to do with Beekeeping?
Something to do with my perception I think...I never thought bees were so diligent, intelligent and lovely creatures till I attended this workshop (worker bees know which beehive they belong to, they keep the hive tidy, if the temperature within the hive rises to an undesirable level then all the worker bees fan in sync in order to bring down the temp...beelings fed with royal honey for a week become queen bees while those fed with it just for day become worker bees...there is only one queen bee in a hive and if a queen bee dies the worker bees sense the absence (scent) within an hour max and start preparing to 'create' queen bees by changing the diet of the beelings and on and on...
Also, I never thought Boyhood would change my perception about being a father unlike anything that I have read/seen/experienced in my life so far!
I have 'installed' a few Bee colonies in my farm recently (primarily for pollination, the honey is a by-product!) and the Beekeeping course is a primer...
Boyhood I would say is a refresher course on Parenting :-) Go figure!!!!!!
And for the bee dance, see it to believe it!
(A German guy by the name Karl Von Frisch got Nobel prize in 1973 for researching just this!!)
No comments:
Post a Comment