Pinocchio - 2022

Only movies can help you visualize the wonderland of fairies & their magical land and in this case it’s puppets. It affects your senses in a way that it takes a while to come out of it. For those 2 hrs you are in a world where reality is the imagination. 

At 54 I am still as amazed, fascinated, blown and wait for a release like a 14 year old. I am sure  that’s true for many of us oldies but age is not a factor when you can experience this magical world and let go of your reality. 

You walk in as an adult but come out a child. 😀

I have not read the book, but I think all of us know him as a character whose nose grows if he lies. The last remembrance of Pinnochio is in one of the Shrek movies – where he is another character / toy who raids Shrek’s house and later helps him in escaping the castle.

To take such a character and create a beautiful movie which one remembers for a long time after the movie is over requires exquisite vision and execution. Seeing the movie I felt like every scene is from a story book, beautifully coloured and textured. The animation is very different from the Pixar movies which have been laying the rules for animation movies. 

Not just the animation, the story also is beautiful with a strong message on war and accepting someone as they are and not comparing them with someone they have in their mind or what they want them (their daughters / wife) to be.

Director Del Toro, known for his visual storytelling, waited for 15 years to make this movie. He used stop motion puppets which are operated through mechanical gears in their heads & the title character was fabricated via metal 3D printing. 

Read about it here:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/03/movies/guillermo-del-toro-pinocchio-puppets-stop-motion.html 

Do not miss the director’s cut which is also available on Netflix to understand the journey of making the film. There’s a lot which goes behind every scene and every movement. 

The sine curve of life

Mangalore - Jan 2023

Up, down, down, down, Up down….The roller-coaster of life is like the waves I tried to navigate in the sea a few days back when I made my 1st dive at Netrani Islands. .

Out on the boat we rode for almost 1 and half hrs before we reached the mainland - Murudeshwar. They toppled me over with an oxygen tank, taught me sign language and took me down 100 m to show sparkling, beautifully colored fishes - fishes which looked like they had come out of the painting. The fishes were not a big deal. I had seen a larger variety of fishes & corals in Havelock Island (Andaman & Nicobar). 

But the dive was a big deal. 

Reflections: 

The ride: Sea is a choppy place and we were riding in a small boat with 12 people. None of us can swim. Our life depended on the flimsy jacket and the skills of a local boatman. My whole family was in it and we boarded with the enthusiasm of doing the dive not caring so much about the boat which would be in the ocean for 1 and half hrs. This thought came to me as we were on our way back and the waves were really big and a bit scary probably because of tides. 

Much of our life we ride different boats - job, marriage being 2 of the longest rides for most of us. We jump into both with the excitement of a dive without accessing the depth of water and its impact. In both of these cases experience is the only teacher rest is all theory.

So  what is our safety jacket - do we actually have one ? Each of us has our own jacket but it’s hidden or not worn like many of my fellow riders in the boat. The question is - All of us reached the land safely - so do we really need one ? 

We do,don’t wait for the right time…unless it's too late.

The sea: The sea is a place of change and in many ways reflects life. Every wave is different and is unpredictable. You are walking calmly and a large wave wets your trousers or takes away your slippers kept on the beach. 

If you are lucky your slippers may come back the next morning. 

Just like many friends, relatives, colleagues who took their boat and got busy riding the waves of success or despair. 

Last year when we went to Goa during monsoon was the first time when I experienced the fury of the sea which scared me. It;s very easy to associate anger with human & animals as you can see it in their face / expression but this is the first time I could visualize the fury of the sea. The only thoughts which kept coming back to me were tsunami. Even if you are a strong swimmer you don’t stand a chance against it. 

It has to be either your luck or God’s hand.

In life we are swamped by monstrous waves and at times we have to give in, like a bad day, just like you cannot assign a reason to a big wave you may not be able to assign it to a bad. 

Accept the day and ride on. Like today I cycled 8 km to overturn the nauseating and suffocating feeling which had no reason to be there.

And sat to write it. Life is hard work - there is no easy way out. 

The dive: One of the critical elements of the dive is you stop breathing through your nose and breathe only using your mouth. That fundamental change sounds easy but when you go diving for the first time and try it, you revert back to nose because we are hard wired to do it. I came back in a minute, not able to suppress my natural instinct. 2nd time round - the whole brain was focused on only one thing - breath through your mouth and with complete concentration I could do it and was comfortable after some time. 

This is akin to my panic attacks which I used to have where the whole body behaves in a completely different way - as if you don’t have any control. Your mind wants something but your body refuses to listen. Anything which goes against nature takes a huge amount of conscious effort and it is possible.

We all have our templates or ways of doing things and it takes a big effort to change and create a new template. It is possible, it may take days, months & years - don’t give up. 

Hold your breath and dive in.