The prostitute

Recently, a news channel did a report on AIDS activists working towards spreading awareness among the sex workers in Sonagachhi, Calcutta. The coverage showed an activist talking to these ladies about HIV and the various aspects of preventing or minimizing the chances of the virus spreading. She also spoke of a quiz that will be held to gauge how much these ladies have understood the threats that AIDS poses. Funnily enough, she also went on to explain what 'quiz' meant describing the process in Baangla.

Following this, there were short interviews of a few of these ladies.

In general, the ladies spoke of various instances of their lives when they have had to dodge the onlooker a bit, so as not to arouse any suspicion.

However, what was striking about the narratives was the in-your-face honesty of the manner in which these stories they told. There was no pretence, no guilt whatsoever. Infact, most of them were told with a nice dash of humour & most of the women present laughed easily.

And I sit here in the air conditioned comforts of my office each day; struggling to strike a balance, rushing for covers.

The stills

Among the many insights, particularly into cinema, my close friend Vasant has given me, one has been about the separation of 'art' cinema from socio-political movie making, both of which, in common parlance, are categorized under parallel or art cinema. Without delving deep into the details of what are the traits that make up this separation, I should say that 'art' movies are just about aesthetic aspects of the world around us whereas socio-political movies are a commentary on various other panoramas of human behaviour and/or societal & political occurrences of our times. Socio-political movies, at certain level, have a message or an opinion, whereas 'art' cinema is an evocation of just our finer aesthetic side, more to do with the aspects of beauty and emotion than the faculties of values and reason.

About a week back, I started reading a book by Sergi Eisenstein by the name 'The film sense'. The first chapter is titled 'Word & Image' and essentially, to my mind, talks about this evocation, the trait that demarcates art cinema. This evocation is not limited just to cinema, per se, as Eisenstein himself points out. However, it is in the context of cinema that Eisenstein elaborates on this aspect of evocation.

We associate a theme with images. A clock is representative, for example, of time. So when we look at a clock, we do not see three arms circling about an axis; rather, we perceive time. Likewise, all that comprises memory are images; and the thought of a subject paints in our minds all of the images that we associate with that subject. And as human beings, a lot of these images, representative of a theme, are common to the memories of each one of us.

So as an art film maker, one's goal is to reproduce in the audience's mind, by juxtaposing images, the whole theme itself. Eisenstein goes a step further & says that not only the theme should be reached in the audience's mind but the path to this holistic realization of the theme should be relived by the audience, the way the artiste envisioned the theme by the means of her images. Therefore, its really an evocation, more of a journey than a mere destination.

A silent night. A sea drowned in its own vastness. Battleships silhouetted against starlight - These were images from Eisenstein's film "The battleship Potemkin". A perfect build up of anxiety; an illustration of a time fraught with fear and uncertainty, almost crawling; a shape of things to come.

The montage, whatever little I saw of it in "The battleship Potemkin", is potentially capable of rendering words useless. Its minimalist, breathtaking and true "art"!

The spark

I know nothing save things the birds have lost,
the sea I left behind, or my sister crying.
Why is the abundance of places?
Why does day lock with day?
Why the dark night swilling round in our mouths?
And why the dead?

: Excerpt from 'There is no forgetting' by Pablo Neruda

"Cogito, ergo sum" - I think, therefore, I am.

: Rene Descartes.

Creativity, for the sake of simplicity, could be defined as a coming together of hitherto unrelated truths to arrive at a new one.

To pick the simplest of examples, then, depicting bereavement (#1 truth) as falling leaves during autumn (#2 truth) is a poetic instance of creativity.

This new created form also need not be just be a manifestation of one aspect of the many traits of human behaviour. So a poem which stirs our emotions is just as creative an endeavour as Einstein's theory about frames of reference. Allowing for certain exceptions, a creative idea is not something you & I did not know or could not have arrived at ourselves; rather, it is something we did not think about in a certain way.

To my mind, there are at least two discernible factors that contribute, at the level of the individual, to creativity:

To connect hitherto unconnected truths, first of all, one needs to know the truths. An obvious extrapolation of this is a will to assimilate these truths. The more the channels of information, the more the propensity of utilizing this will to its potential. And in the world that we live in today, there is no dearth of these channels. So the limiting factor, in a lot of cases, is the will. We must realize that knowledge is an investment worth making and that it need not necessarily be connected to tangible, commercial gains in the short run. To nurture our creative selves, we must feed it knowledge, as extensive and as diverse as possible.

The second aspect of this matter is to arrive at the new truth using the gamut of truths one has assembled. Obviously, one does not know of a selection criteria which will guide us in choosing certain truths over others which, by our definition at the beginning of this post, will combine into a new creative truth. For the simplification of matters therefore,

Creativity = a particular permutation of the set of all truths known to an individual

How does one, then, arrive at this particular permutation?

To my mind, there are no definite answers to that question. Deviating from the topic for a moment, if we choose to look at the more limited domain of problem solving, we will realize that, in this case, we have an idea of what the left hand of the creativity equation looks like i.e. what is the solution or the 'creative truth' we wish to arrive at. Obviously, creativity, per se, is much broader an idea than problem solving. But if it is possible to channelize ones creative ideas toward a goal, however broad, it at least gives us a some kind of a workable space.

Secondly, the brain is at its thinking best at certain times. And these times are not one of anger, anxiety or tension, in general. Observing closer still, we can deduce what are really the 'creative times' for each one of us? Is it music, or relaxing walks, or wide open spaces that brings our brains to that optimal state for connecting diverse truths giving rise to a new one?

And ultimately, we need the creative attitude of curiosity, of seeking.

"Look upon the evening as the death of the day; and upon the morning as the birth of all things. Let every moment renew your vision. The wise man is he who constantly wonders afresh."

-Andre Gide

Also, creativity is an aspect of our lives each day. We assimilate and connect truths all the time, a lot of times without really knowing it. Pablo Neruda got a Nobel prize for being creative, but if you can make that child smile..... thats not bad at all!