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.
On Saturday evening, I walked over to Alliance Francaise to watch Rimbaud’s ‘Enfer et Illumination’, a French play that is part of the month long ‘The French Touch’ festival.
The play basically involved a man (Rimbaud) and a woman (his muse?) reciting Rimbaud’s poetry in French, and enacting it in the Kuchipudi tradition (painted faces et al), while English subtitles were projected onto the screen.
I hardly know any French, haven’t ever read Rimbaud, and have no interest in Kuchipudi. The only reason I went for the play was because it was free and therefore allowed.
The number one question everyone is asking me ever since I have gone off consumption is different from the number one question I have been asking myself.
While everyone else is consumed with the scientific curiosity of how will I decide what’s a necessity, I’m worried about the more immediate issue of what to do on my next date.
Consumption is a social thing and, of all our social interactions, dating is the one most tied up with buying things.
Let’s do a quick visualization exercise to establish this. Please don’t read beyond the next paragraph until you have completed this exercise.