Mind u Read

In this age of short attention spans Sandeep Reddy Vanga has done the unthinkable with his latest film Animal—he has not only managed to hold our attention in the theatres with a film that’s three hours twenty one minutes long, but also managed to sustain that attention by turning the movie into a topic of intense debate that’s still going on.   Like everyone else I have an opinion too, rather opinions, and have been tweeting intermittently about them, but the film’s success as well as the criticism it has been receiving calls for deeper introspection.   Through this post I hope to touch upon some of the aspects that I found interesting about the film; both good and bad.   In the process I’ll also try and explain why I feel Ranbir Kapoor’s character in the film Ranvijay Singh Balbir is a feminist and not a misogynist. I suspect many others feel that way too but don’t realise it yet or are able to say it out loudly. Hear me out and then you can either agree or disagree with me. Whatever

They say every unpleasant situation also has a positive side to it. It ends up teaching us new lessons. Like a silver lining for a cloud. In the same manner, I learnt an interesting lesson recently. I call my lesson ‘The Scarcity Mindset’ . It’s a key ingredient of our being and something we seem to have totally forgotten when it concerns our online personas. This post is my tiny attempt to share what I learnt. I hope you see value in it too. Here’s my story.

We have been reading many stories about Artificial Intelligence (AI), especially since the emergence of ChatGPT—a generative AI tool that possesses immense human-like powers to consume and create content on the fly.   They say only those who embrace AI will thrive in the future, and that it will replace most jobs that humans can do today. There are others, like Elon Musk, who say this AI technology has the potential to go rogue and it needs to be regulated before it’s too late.   Whatever the verdict on that, and whether people choose to use these AI tools or not, one thing is for sure:   AI is going to impact all our lives at a very fundamental human level, and there’s no escaping that.   To illustrate my point, I would like to share three mini stories that I encountered recently.   These are simple stories; not about the wonderful things AI can do for us; but about our reaction to that as humans—leading to the discussion about the battle we all will find ourselves in eventually.   On

#Pathaan Kiss karne nahi….Kick karne aaya hai…. That was Shahrukh Khan’s response to a silly question on Twitter during one of his many #AskSRK sessions before the release of Pathaan. However, what he said is just the partial truth and he did KISS. Before you jump to other conclusions— KISS means Keep it simple, stupid! The KISS principle states that most systems work best if they are kept simple rather than made complicated. That’s exactly what Shahrukh Khan did to set up the stage for Pathaan’s blockbuster success. The same principle is also used to structure and mount the film too. Let me elaborate with a similar KISS approach. I’ll pick 5 areas to focus on. At places I’ll use Shahrukh Khan’s tweets to help with the story. Here it goes…

When an event in the real world is inspired by a creative work, they say—life imitates art. It’s most often used in the context of movies influencing life. Have you ever heard of a movie influencing itself through its own art? The obvious thing to say would be—if the movie is good, then more people will watch it, and then it makes more money. That’s how a movie influences its own destiny. But…there’s a higher order ‘life imitating art’ event that I noticed recently. It’s with the Naatu Naatu song from RRR; thanks to its recent Golden Globe Awards win for best original song. I see that song as an extraordinary self-fulfilling prophecy which I am sure even the filmmakers did not see coming. Here’s my theory: