A caterpillar's life

A caterpillar is crawling on a crowded floor. Uncertain and fearful, it eyes a way out of the hurried boots that surround it. I am reminded of the half squished beautiful violet green fly that I had seen few days back on my way to the canteen in office. I am terrified of the fate that befalls this one caterpillar. Suddenly, as if miraculously, comes a newspaper delicately handled by a ruffled hand, the very hand of God to the caterpillar. The caterpillar swivels itself into the paper and is deposited carefully on a leaf to live another day.

We see the caterpillar from the eyes of this monk, who rescued it. It is not just an insect that is there to support, improve or hinder our existence. It is a moving, feeling being with it's own life rhythm, busy in slithering, foraging, reproducing and perpetuating itself.

In fact, the long shots of moving, throbbing life, of trees swinging wildly, of rain lashing the Mumbai roads, of the sea that lies beyond, all of it inhabit the worldview of the monk. He sees himself connected to everything around him in the minutest possible ways in all his actions and their consequences. It makes him look rather like a speck on a large wall, much less than the transient, but individualistic, beings we feel ourselves to be. But there is also grandeur in this vision, which places him firmly in a chain that starts and ends in infinity. To bring this vision, to take his eyes, and bring out its inner dimensions through the landscape is what Anand Gandhi does in this breathtaking segment of Ship of Theseus.

Thus, while the images are hauntingly beautiful, they are indelible because they impinge on our souls, wrestling with deeper questions of ethics and morality, and create huge craters where our hearts lie, making the whole experience maddeningly exhilarating.

With all three stories, Anand Gandhi makes you want to believe in the grandeur of life. Of possibilities of change and renewal within the narrow confines we lead our lives.

GBL

Not very long back, perhaps even today, when foreign reporters visited North Korea, they were taken through a guided tour of the "achievements" of, no not the country, but the GBL. The Great and Beloved Leader, as Kim II-Sung perhaps christened himself, was the war hero, the helper of the peasants, the builder of dams, the leader of armies, the hope of the working class, the eternal leader. Songs were sung about him. Symposiums were held celebrating his very many political and intellectual achievements. Anybody who had slightest of doubts about GBL's greatness was deemed a traitor. In the meanwhile, the country lived on the edge of fear and insecurity, held massive military parades and kept one of the largest standing armies. No doubt all of it helped conceal the massive under-development, corruption and sheer ruthlessness of GBL's regime. Even self proclaimed leftists felt his fat neck to be a constant provocation in need of a bullet through it.  But why all this song and dance about a man dead and gone in a land far and away? Because we have our own GBL in the making, variously called NaMo and Feku, who is being propped up by a relentless marketing machinery to be the saviour that India has been waiting for the last millennium. And we would have been terrified by the prospect of his homecoming, if we did not know that India is bigger and older and more diverse and secure than North Korea or Gujarat. We should perhaps only be amused, but then how can you be before an Indian elections?