I haven’t watched TV or read newspapers or magazines for more than a year now, with one exception — twice a month, I stop by at the roadside magazine stall opposite my house and hand over thirty rupees for a copy of Time Out Mumbai.
However, even though I have been buying the magazine for almost two years now, I only started to think of it as a necessity when I started my experiment.
The Saturday Night Movie Marathon turned out to be exactly what I needed after working all day on another big presentation.
To begin with, fewer people turned up — and, while twenty is perhaps the right number for a party — five works better for a movie marathon.
Then, GK turned up with a few DVDs of his own and we decided to leave aside my lineup of classic World War 2 movies and watch ‘Into the Wild’ instead.
Perhaps the biggest challenge of being off consumption is the difficulty of maintaining an active social life.
When you take away the context in which social interactions happen — eating or drinking out, or going out for a movie or a play — you basically make it really difficult for people to spend time with you.
A home-cooked meal, or a walk along the sea, works well once or twice, but, eventually, your friends are likely to tire of such simple pursuits, even if you don’t.
Undeterred by my earlier escapade with ‘The French Touch’ festival, I returned to the Alliance Francaise auditorium on Thursday evening to watch Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960 film ‘Le Petit Soldat’ (’The Little Soldier’).
Set against the backdrop of the Algerian War, the film narrates the tragic love story of Michel Subord and Anna Karina who fall in love in spite of belonging to warring terrorist groups. The film pulsates with the same restless energy as ‘Breathless’, my favorite Godard movie, which was screened at the festival earlier on Tuesday. So, in spite of the little anti-climax at the end, when the DVD stuck and wouldn’t play, I thoroughly enjoyed the movie, or at least the part of the movie I did watch.
During my year of being off-consumption, I’m not allowed to watch movies, plays, or concerts, unless they are free.
However, I’m discovering that Mumbai has a wide variety of free entertainment to offer; all you need is the inclination, and a copy of Time Out Mumbai.
But it was not Time Out, but a flier someone thrust into my hand as I walked out of the Alliance Francaise auditorium after watching Godard’s ‘Little Soldier’ that led me to the Little Theater at NCPA on Friday evening to watch Surabhi Sharma’s documentary film ‘Jahaji Music: India in the Caribbean’.
I have spent the morning listening to ‘Something’s Missing’ from John Mayer’s truly delectable album ‘Heavier Things’.
I always find it amazing when a song resonates so well with whatever state of mind I’m in. Replace ‘guitar’ with ‘laptop’ in the second last paragraph, and this song could have been written for me.
I’m not alone, I wish I was
‘Cause then I’d know I was down because
I couldn’t find a friend around
To love me like they do right now
They do right now