The not-so-secret diary

Between a Thursday and Friday in the middle of October, and in the short span of 20 hours, I found myself contemplating how the very humdrum task of washing & ironing clothes can be undertaken in two ways which are a world apart yet give you the same end result. On Thursday evening in Central London I found myself in Leicester Square watching the UK premiere of Kiran Rao's Dhobi Ghaat. For this I must thank some of my friends who tipped me off in time, so I could buy the much-in-demand tickets at the London Film Festival. And I also escaped a potential anticlimax, by reaching the 'venue' early only to discover it was the wrong venue (not the South Bank!) but still in time to grab a friend and rush to the correct one. Dhobi Ghaat (literal translation Washerman, River Bank or 'the river bank where they wash, dry the clothes') is another take on life in Mumbai. Its Kiran Rao's debut film as writer/ director. The story has a mix of 'modern western' c...

The past is but the past of a beginning. H. G. Wells And so Kapoor and her team at Free Pixels have opened a little window for us that takes us along with our modern day tools from the past to the future with a little stop in the present. Many of us have always believed that the only limitation to technological innovation is one's imagination. The exponential growth in technology over the last few decades has only re-affirmed this belief. In this short film, the writer and director encourage us to step out of the box and pull, push, stretch, compress or in other words simply re-shape our view of the world with one of the most ubiquitous modern-day tools: a touch phone. There is some interesting camera work and animation with a background story that is as thought-provoking as the technology story. The subtle reference to our robotic, production-line world is the complete anti-thesis of the free mind. Yet, it also points to systematic research and experimentation or a scienti...