A part of me was born three years ago
I grew up watching random things on sidewalks, tour abandoned buildings and places with no meaning, cried my insides when I knew I failed the history test and the same night read world famous mysteries at the end of a torch beam. I rode my bicycle at night to see a thousand fireflies mirroring on a canal, listening to silence and also mildly being aware of the ghost stories that would conjure up over by the creek. I traced silhouettes of calendar pictures, dragged an ink dripped thread from a squeezed book to make images that had no meaning but beauty inexplicable in the conventional sense. As I grew older, existence cultivated the idealist in me, burnt my sketches and smashed my torch against the walls of college library. The fireflies dimmed, the silence became silent.
PFC Year One : The first logo
I was a victim of so many myths about myself. Back in graduation, I applied to UCLA for theatre along with six other applications to Ivy leagues and majoring in VLSI or something like that. Obviously, UCLA didn’t bother to respond and I didn’t get a VISA. For two years, I was wandering hopelessly, taking jobs that I thought were what I wanted to do in life, incessantly propelled through peer pressure induced by parents. Then I went to a respectable B-school and pursued marketing. I used to feel happy about making a commercial or an audio-visual presentation for everything; for a seminar, for the student’s council, a friend’s wedding, for a friend who wanted to resurrect his broken relationship, farewells, for almost everything. So much so that one of my AVs was picked up by one of India’s biggest cellular companies, without my knowledge. They had clearly taken my idea and made a commercial out of it which was a huge success for them. I wished them well and moved on. We had a film class back in b-school. A famous IIFT professor from FTII would come down to take classes. He is a very humble man with pure passion for cinema, carrying cynicism at the world in his journalist attire. Friends would get pop-corn, cola and everything possible when he’d screen films to discuss. The SMS wars would begin in the back benches. He screened Pather Panchali and half the class quietly left the room, taking advantage of a Saturday second half. I was sneered at by my friends because I would ask questions and that would delay the recess. So I would speak to him in the canteen, just listening to him about cinema. I used to feel horrible how my friends would disrespect such an art form. People took me for a snob, a CP king (a popular jargon in b-schools for Class Participation) but I didn’t know how to react. That one day when he screened Pather Panchali, I couldn’t sleep. The images kept haunting me for days but I did nothing about it. Days passed and I got suckered into assignments, case studies and all the hogwash we were brainwashed with. Placements arrived and I thought I wanted to pursue a “creative” career. Oddly enough I ended up taking an IT marketer’s job in a respectable company. The corporate seduction and the mirage of seeing a creative career was what made me take that up.
At job, I would always end up making campaigns, on print or audio-visuals. Imagine doing all that in a pure B2B IT company. I took up a lot of activities which involved an audio visual or some kind of storyboarding, most of them were not even part of my job description. Now when I look back at my entire life, I realized I was being drawn towards cinema, without me being aware of it. In my small school theatricals, the college videos, the campaigns I made at work were always looking out for a cinematic medium to express my ideas. I connected these disjoint points to form this conclusion a year and a half back, when I came on to PFC. I kept pursuing jobs for money, existence, conventional wisdom and the meaningless urge to confirm to the MBA bandwagon. I realized the futility of my life while on PFC. Yes, you may ask how a cinema portal can alter your attitude towards life. As days went by, I was leading dual lives. One was this sham of a personality; doing exactly what convention teaches me to be, take a respectable career, be the corporate whore, generate ideas around a banana peel on the road. Then there was this alternate personality that I lived on PFC. This was really who “I” was, where I felt “myself”. I would explore the world of cinema through the eyes of so many fellow victims of corporate burnout, acquire wisdom from filmmakers I grew up being in awe of. I felt liberated. I felt like a kid who would love to be in the basement, like a hideout and work on a wooden airplane while in the morning he goes to school and gets his knuckles lashed from the teacher, not to have finished his homework. First I was just an observer, commenting on posts here and there. I was not aware what PFC was doing to my sub-conscious all this while. It’s here where I was introduced to world cinema. I would save money to buy DVDs and watch one film every night on my laptop. My first was Polanski’s Knife in the Water. It disturbed me till I went back to the store and picked up 8 more DVDs. In a month I would buy around 20-30 world cinema DVDs a month. I cut down on night outs and shopping in order to save money for DVDs. I would wait the entire day for my favorite three hours of the day. After a point I started writing my about these films on PFC. It was difficult and I would never be able to write unless something hits me. Gradually, I became faster and only wrote on films/subjects that would haunt me. I had sizeable number of posts when PFC made me an author here. PFC is where I live my true self. This is where I belong. It has taught me that my life has been an unending pursuit of absurdism, wallowing in unending existential angst. I have found out what I truly want to do in my life; CONTRIBUTE TO CINEMA in any way that I can. I found my calling through PFC. I am on a verge of quitting my job and take up something related to cinema. I haven’t found anything yet but I am hopeful. It’s not quite easy but PFC gave me the strength to decide. Thanks PFC for making me realize what I came here for, the meaning of my entire fucking life. Thanks PFC for giving me the happiest day of my life which in no way I can articulate. I am utterly incapable or rather linguistically challenged to express something as beautiful as that day, which now seems like a surreal David Lynch dream. PFC, If not for you, I really wouldn’t have been the person I am or the person I want to be. Happy third birthday PFC! A part of me was born three years ago!
Tags: PFC Third Year Anniversary Event
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
wowee zowee… kickass bloody awesome post… emosanal kar diya by gawd… i mirror ur sentiments bro… on this third budday of PFC, here’s hoping more and more of us cubicle bound misfuts realize their true calling & light up the world of cinema with their boundless passion. viva PFC. and million thanks & magik ki jhappis to all the unsung heroes who keep running the show, in the backyard, despite all odds. and a BIG one to the guy who woudn’t mind parting with his ‘kachcha’ so that the show goes on. much love, admiration and respect!
Thank God you didn’t get the visa and get to study VLSI, otherwise you’d have ended up like me. :P
Isnt that the cover album of Pink Floyd’s ” Wish you were here”? Nice! Happy birthday PFC! I identify with your “I felt like a kid who would love to be in the basement, like a hideout and work on a wooden airplane while in the morning he goes to school and gets his knuckles lashed from the teacher, not to have finished his homework.” feeling!Nice post bro!
This is great. About time someone wrote a kickass superawesome post on the revolution that is PFC. As Tyler Durden said, the great depression is our lives. I always envied the hippies or even the Naxals who had something to revolt in the ’60s and ’70s.
PFC makes me feel like a revolutionary along with all the other readers, silently revolting against our shitty cubicle jobs, and against the song and dance circus that has been parading itself as Indian ‘cinema’ for a while. And Indian cinema is changing. Slowly, yes, but it’s changing, and we are at the cusp.
PFC told me that there were people out there like me, who appreciate what real cinema is, that we are creating an audience for the good cinema that this country needs, that it might be worthwhile for me to stop making any more memory chips and try learning how to make films.
Keep that chin high and that fist clenched, bro! Good luck with your job quitting and doing something meaningful in life, something that you want to do.
Hippies for the life!
Wow, what a heartfelt and wonderful post. Wishing you the best for your future.
i already love you boss. neeraj ghaywan brought this post to my notice. i understood every word, every puntuation of your post.
send me your address i want to gift you a cd of zbigniew Priesner’s ‘requeim for a friend’. he was kieslowsky’s composer.
please keep writing.
and happy birthday PFC!!!
wow……what a post…..this is what i call the PFC effect….
Long Live PFC…..
wow! what a post..awesome..I loved “First I was just an observer, commenting on posts here and there. I was not aware what PFC was doing to my sub-conscious all this while”…exactly the same with me.
@Kieslowski’s Minion
i cannot find ur previous posts listed below ur profile.Could be possibly because of a different name u used for them. Could u provide a link for those.
Hi My Dearest Friend
Thank you for putting all my feeling into words. I have been dealing with the exact same feeling for over a month now, but never knew they how to put it all together.
WHEN YOU SAY ” It has taught me that my life has been an unending pursuit of absurdism, wallowing in unending existential angst” , I FELT RELIEVED . Finally I knew what exactly my last 2-3 years had been .
I too have decided to quit my Cubicle bound, Techie job. Have no idea how to go about my dream of pursuing my goal of becoming India’s best Film maker.
Happy Birthday PFC for changing so many lives.
Abhijit