9 Months: I feel born.
I don’t know what to say or how to start. You can call it a cliché, but sometimes things just fall into place, you don’t really plan them, or think about it. Sometimes these things are really small, sometimes rather big, and sometimes the big things in life don’t matter, and it’s the million little things that create the universe around you.
As far back as I can remember, I’ve always loved cinema, but at different stages of my life, different cinema. I wasn’t born with Godard or Bergman on my television. It all happened 12 years ago, sitting on a stool at my grandparents, I saw Eeshwar, I didn’t know what a movie was, having grown up watching TopCat and Popeye. Watching real emotions with real people, watching people cry, laugh and do all that we do everyday. I was sucked. I was seduced into the thearapeutic madness of cinema. I always wanted life to be a motion picture, and the motion picture to be life.
But slowly, the madness grew bigger, a bit more insane, a bit more odd for the people around me. They thought of it as a passing craze. Maybe I grow up and become a civil engineer, and shut this crap. Not really, I never ever thought of that. I always always lived in my world of cinema.
It was suffocating. Whoever says mean things by other people doesn’t dissappoint them is probably lying. They do, but to a certain extent, after that, it becomes sadism. You will ask me why.
To prove the other person wrong. It’s pleasure. To create something of your own against their wishes is sadistic pleasure. To write off every mean thing they say, to push them off the road and stand on the undisputed cliff. All of us have our cliffs, the height is the only difference.
As Tarantino says “You have a loaded gun, and you know you’ve got what it takes to put it in their faces and blow their heads off. It’s about never taking the gun out. It’s about never touching the gun, never raising it, never pulling the trigger, never blowing their heads off.”
The loneliness in my cinema was soon covered up. I bounced upon PFC. Honestly, I had merely heard the name once. Neither did I go through the website. I just went through it’s introduction. I knew this was the place I was yearning to be in. Obviously the difficult catch was how to get in, with some stellar authors on board, it was out of the question.
I found pleasure in the tiniest of things, and I found pain likewise. Sitting at a restaurant, observing people around you, staring at them for hours, putting them in your shoes, lying down alone listening to music with lights switched off, looking at crushed packets of cigarettes and writing stories, trying my first cigarette myself, experiencing everything that everyone wants to, and yet being stuck in a time warp, not wanting to move on from the movies I watched, the books I read, I wanted to just sit in front of the screen with my cousins forever, chatting and blabbering, laughing and crying. I wish it could go on forever. PFC made that possible.
But well, some things are bound to fall in place. I tried and I tried, and I gave up after some time. After giving in about three I-views, atleast 4 or 5 of my next articles were rejected, and I was dejected. I wanted to be an author, I just did. For two months, I never got back here.
One last try, yet another rejection. Fuck. Two days down the line, I have an authorship request, and after that point, everyday of my life revolved around PFC and it’s authors!
I lived in an odd warp that maybe I was the only existing being who loved cinema or who went crazy with every new release.
In fact, when people ask me how I got my inclination to write, it becomes really weird. I hated writing. Every sane student hates writing long essays. I was sane enough till a few years ago. My Year 9 English teacher made me insane.
Blast from the past: Have written 18 five liner user reviews for Bollywood Hungama. I thought of myself as a critic.
But somewhere I used to go through self doubt. I used to see geniuses like Anurag Kashyap struggle. Would I also have to toggle for 13 years to scream out my voice? I used to see Abhishek Kapoor who took 14 years to make his mark. My grandfather changed movie reels at theatres in Kenya, he ended up owning them. My father also wanted to make movies. He is also toggling to make his next.
But somewhere PFC provides you with satisfaction. It kills that self doubt, to reassure you that there are many such cinephiles here who love cinema, and are yearning to do something, and cannot do it as of for now. It grants you refuge and shelter with the people who share the fucking same passion and love that you do
The credit for PFC not only goes to Oz, or the 13 people that started it. Yes it goes the most to them, but it goes to all the authors that pooled in their resources to create PFC a monster, and something every cinephile can relate to.
People who love David Dhawan and people who love Quentin Tarantino, people who love Joginder, to people who crave to watch Irfaan Khan’s intensity. PFC is made up of contrastial authors, and if all of them made the same dish, it would suck. All of them are unique, none of them are employed or paid, it’s by choice and passion and will always be.
I never felt so complete or so satisfied ever in my life before. PFC gave me that feeling of a surrounding I always wished for, maybe a bit more than that.
PFC gave me a bit of my self importance that I always craved for. It filled in the holes and gaps that I always wanted somebody to fill. People at random told me they read my reviews, they wanted to know what I thought about a particular movie, nothing more glorious than that. Trust me, nothing.
Movies were always about expressions and that moment of awkwardness. The images of Requiem For A Dream still haunt me at times, the voices from Graves of the Fireflies still creep me out, the pain in La Strada shuts me up and the love in Gulzar’s movies still amuses me, and the self doubt in 8 and a half still intrigues me. Nothing possible, without PFC. I would have still been watching Life Partner.
PFC made me much much much quieter. It altered me in a weird way, a way I cannot explain.
” I used to crack a joke once, everybody used to laugh at it, then one day, they chose not to laugh at it. I was humiliated. I decided not to crack the joke again. I decided not to do many such things. I shut out many other parts‘ – Sreehari
When all these parts were shut, Oz opened something for me.
I raise a toast to wish PFC a very very happy anniversary on touching it’s third year, and giving me 9 months for me to come out of the womb.
Tags: 3 years, 9 months, anniversary, discovery, handa, happy birthday, jehan, love, Movies, oz, passion, pfc, PFC Third Year Anniversary Event, realisation
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
Jehan- quite a heartfelt post I must say.Yes PFC indeed has come to be a 2nd home for a lot of us ( me included ) and the connect is quite special indeed.The 3rd anniversary deserves a toast- 3 cheers to PFC.May the flow continue forever and may we witness lot many more such landmarks !!!
Exactly my feelings friend. It is indeed what we live off. You have captured the essence of PFC quite beautifully! Bring on the chardonnay, rain the confetti, smear the cake all over!!! Let’s celebrate!
yea bro, lets fucknig celebrate man! this is one BIG day for all of us filmi keedas who have found our voice here! Cheerz!
more power to you bro J. now go make that PFCOne short and blow their heads off. i know you will bloody well do it. cheers to PFC & viva passion. Lovely post… dirct dil se… lets raise a toast to the home that we can just ‘BE’ without worrying about nagging girl friends and bosses. rawk de phatte!
Haha, Yes Sethu sir, thanks.
Yup Neeraj, I cant imagine Oz’s feeling. Wow
Hehe, thanks Magik! Inshallah!
For all you ardent bloggers out there, this is interesting-
http://screenville.blogspot.com/2009/07/seeking-desperatly-world-film-bloggers.html
Sorry for posting it here ….didn’t know where else to do it so I picked the latest post!
Happy Birthday PFC!!
viva PFC … nice write-up…
since i’m still pretty much in the womb here so i shud just say…
Cheers!!
But somewhere PFC provides you with satisfaction. It kills that self doubt, to reassure you that there are many such cinephiles here who love cinema, and are yearning to do something, and cannot do it as of for now. It grants you refuge and shelter with the people who share the fucking same passion and love that you do
Jehan, You have taken out words fro our hearts. Awesome article.
PFC made us feel important, indeed.
Wish a long way ahead to all of us here
Cheers to that !