Showing posts with label Al Pacino. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Al Pacino. Show all posts
Sunday, September 29, 2024
Friday, February 08, 2019
AOC From The Bronx Channels Al Pacino From The Bronx
We can have Democrats they fight like @AOC: pic.twitter.com/yl4YVwndB4
— Justice Democrats (@justicedems) February 8, 2019
@AOC From The Bronx Channels Al Pacino From The Bronx @saikatc @_waleedshahid https://t.co/yUmJws29Ab @VarshPrakash @justicedems @sunrisemvmt
— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) February 8, 2019
Tuesday, February 02, 2016
Creativity
the most creative children are the least likely to become the teacher’s pet, and in response, many learn to keep their original ideas to themselves. In the language of the critic William Deresiewicz, they become the excellent sheep........ Most prodigies never make that leap. They apply their extraordinary abilities by shining in their jobs without making waves. They become doctors who heal their patients without fighting to fix the broken medical system or lawyers who defend clients on unfair charges but do not try to transform the laws themselves. ......The parents of ordinary children had an average of six rules, like specific schedules for homework and bedtime. Parents of highly creative children had an average of fewer than one rule.
...... Creativity may be hard to nurture, but it’s easy to thwart. ...... the early roots of world-class musicians, artists, athletes and scientists, he learned that their parents didn’t dream of raising superstar kids. They weren’t drill sergeants or slave drivers. ...... Top concert pianists didn’t have elite teachers from the time they could walk; their first lessons came from instructors who happened to live nearby and made learning fun. Mozart showed interest in music before taking lessons, not the other way around. Mary Lou Williams learned to play the piano on her own; Itzhak Perlman began teaching himself the violin after being rejected from music school. ........ Even the best athletes didn’t start out any better than their peers. ...... A majority of the tennis stars remembered one thing about their first coaches: They made tennis enjoyable. ..... Expert bridge players struggled more than novices to adapt when the rules were changed; expert accountants were worse than novices at applying a new tax law. ...... In fashion, the most original collections come from directors who spend the most time working abroad. In science, winning a Nobel Prize is less about being a single-minded genius and more about being interested in many things. Relative to typical scientists, Nobel Prize winners are 22 times more likely to perform as actors, dancers or magicians; 12 times more likely to write poetry, plays or novels; seven times more likely to dabble in arts and crafts; and twice as likely to play an instrument or compose music. ........ “The theory of relativity occurred to me by intuition, and music is the driving force behind this intuition,” Albert Einstein reflected. ..... If you want your children to bring original ideas into the world, you need to let them pursue their passions, not yours.
Monday, June 15, 2015
विलियम, हरिवंश, एल, अमिताभ
इंग्लैंड में विलियम शेक्सपियर, भारत में हरिवंश राय बच्चन। अमरिका में एल प्याचीनो, भारतमें अमिताभ बच्चन। लेकिन विलियम शेक्सपियर और एल प्याचीनो एक ही परिवार से नहीं थे।
Saturday, May 16, 2015
Scarface
Al Pacino Interview
all 5ft 7in of him .... he is charismatic – in life, as on screen, you can’t take your eyes off his face. Yet he is low-key, easygoing and incongruously humble. Pacino still appears genuinely bemused by the commotion he has caused since he became the poster boy, along with Robert De Niro, of the golden age of US cinema in the 1970s. ..... In the space of five years, he conquered a series of self-eviscerating outsider roles that are still considered some of the greatest in film history: the inscrutable, passive-aggressive Michael Corleone in The Godfather I and II ..... Out of step with the power franchises of the next decade, he fell out of favour in the 1980s – though the operatic paroxysms of Scarface struck a popular chord. His box-office weight was reinvigorated in the more nuanced films of the 1990s, with Carlito’s Way, Heat and Donnie Brasco ..... Great parts, he says, like great loves, are very rare. 'Most of the time you’re just trying to survive. All the work isn’t the same. Sometimes there’s only so much you can do in it. You reconcile yourself to that. Only occasionally you find a role that really asks you to go there.’ ...... He has performed in about 100 films and plays, has been nominated for eight Oscars – he won for The Scent of a Woman in 1993 – and has been awarded numerous Emmys and Golden Globes. He also has two Tonys and was nominated in 2010 for his Shylock in The Merchant of Venice on Broadway. He is not the kind of guy to 'sit back and smell the golf balls’. ...... Pacino gives no sense that he has in some way 'arrived’ anywhere or, indeed, that he is a master of anything – he is still 'striving’ for all of that, he says. He is insatiably questioning, grappling for the right words to accurately express what he feels more as instincts; conveying his meaning instead with a glance or a pause. As the director Mike Nichols has said, 'Al is consulting somewhere else. ...... ’ He prefers the certainty of a text on which to project his emotions; it 'frees him up’, he says. 'It’s all about the play for me,’ he declares with the zeal of a wide-eyed undergraduate. It is remarkable that he is so unjaded. It was his 75th birthday only a few days ago. His girlfriend, the actress Lucila Solá, 36, and his children, 14-year-old twins Olivia and Anton, threw him a party. ....... after a few films in the past four years taken on for financial reasons. (He lost millions in 2010 when his business manager was found to be embezzling his money.) His recent work heralds a potential fifth-act renaissance where he is once again emotionally in tune with his material. ....... late last year he delivered a self-reflective performance in the darkly comic The Humbling, about the sixtysomething actor Simon Axler, who, having lived vicariously through his roles, finds that, when forced to abandon the theatre, he has no real life left to speak of. ..... by his own acknowledgement acting is the very life-giving force of his existence. 'It’s sort of like breathing to me. It gave me life. It educated me, as little as I am educated. It saved me.’ ......... Like the young Dylan, Pacino was a 'purist,’ a South Bronx street kid turned ardent theatre actor who was entirely unprepared for the distorting lens of fame that The Godfather brought him in 1972. 'I had a strange reaction to it. The reaction wasn’t positive. I was catapulted out of a cannon.
People are more accepting of fame today because of all the media outlets. Young people even aspire to it,’ he says with incredulity.
........ Pacino 'felt bombarded by life’ and by people who approached him on the streets. 'I became more aware of myself, constantly reminded that I had this name because [strangers] kept calling me by it.’ Pacino says he has always been 'a loner’, 'very sensitive’ – he still is. 'Being an outsider is part of being an artist. You try to conform. But some of us just can’t. I didn’t know what was expected of me. I still don’t.’ ...... he was drinking, seeking 'an anodyne’ to fame and a respite from the exhaustion of assuming his characters’ identities. 'That’s how I played things then. I had to absorb the character. I never protected myself. Michael [Corleone] affected me for quite a few years afterwards. I sort of kept that internal thing.’ ......... 'I like it here, where my senses are. I don’t need to be “put out” any more.’ The steadiness of therapy, which he still does several times a week, also helped to support him. 'I’d be on seven times a week if I could,’ he says, chuckling. ......... 'Sonny’ (Pacino’s nickname; he was christened Alfredo) was instead close to his grandfather, a plasterer, and – above all – his mother. Her various jobs included cinema usher; sometimes she took him to work with her. An only child, he retreated into his imagination, re-enacting scenes from the cinema to 'fill up the loneliness’. At five, he was doing some of Ray Milland’s most dissolute alcoholic scenes from Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend. ...... 'She was very well read, sensitive and intuitive, but troubled.’ He sighs. 'She suffered from depression on and off.’ ...... By the age of nine he was smoking and, at 13, was supplied with booze by the local cop. His baseball team doubled as a quasi-street gang. 'They were the best friends I ever made. A lot of them died very young with the needle, heroin.’ (In his first film, The Panic in Needle Park, in 1971, Pacino played a junkie, a role that he based on his lost friends.) ......... He left school at 16 and moved to the West Village, working odd jobs to save for drama school, and joining the 'fervent’ cafe theatre scene. It was here, at 17, that he met Laughton, who would become a crucial professional and emotional fulcrum for Pacino, helping to shoulder the catastrophic blows of the deaths of his mother, when he was 21, and of his grandfather the following year. ....... He channelled his disorientation and grief into his performances at the Actors Studio, which he joined at 23, under the tutelage of Lee Strasberg, who encouraged him to mine the emotion of real-life experiences. The class was predominantly 'educated’ students. Pacino hints at lingering feelings of inadequacy at that time. 'I knew I was this vagabond kid,’ he says. ........ he had to fight. He auditioned three times for the role of Michael Corleone – Francis Ford Coppola alone wanted him. Paramount wanted Robert Redford or Warren Beatty – until Marcia Lucas, the wife of George, who edited the multiple screen tests, told them, 'Cast Pacino. He undresses you with his eyes.’ ...... Through them alone, Pacino would drip-feed us glimpses of what lurked beneath Michael’s froideur. None of this Pacino can explain. Acting, for him, is 'freeing the unconsciousness, allowing it to take over. Mostly consciousness gets in the way.’ ........... 'I was blinded by the spotlight on my face. ....... In 1989 Diane Keaton, his then girlfriend ...... Their 20-year on-off affair, like most of his relationships, was 'complicated’. In her 2014 memoir Let’s Just Say It Wasn’t Pretty, she wrote, '… those eyes! I kept trying to figure out what I could do to make them mine… For the next 20 years, I kept losing a man I never had.’ ...... A lone wolf, Pacino has never married any of his girlfriends, a long list of strong, smart, generally unstarry women including Jan Tarrant, the acting coach with whom he has a 26-year-old daughter, Julie, and the actress Beverly D’Angelo, the mother of Olivia and Anton. He has been with Solá for the past seven years. ........ New York, where Pacino is still stalwartly based ...... 'My kids are part of why I’m still here. When you have children you attack roles differently. They become the priority.’ He tells me his 'bunker’ at his home in Beverly Hills, a Pacino-esque version of a garden shed where he goes to focus, has been taken over by them. 'So now I’m pottering around the house trying to find new corners to work in. They just bought me a rocking chair for the porch.’ He beams. ......... he is in talks over a script about Napoleon’s final days ...... 'I’m a New Yorker. I drive like a cabbie’ ...... He is fired up after seeing a production of Hamlet last night. 'It’s so wild that play. I’ve read it since I was a boy, but I still can’t get over it. I could see it a 1,000 times a year. The joy! And I’m not even in it.’ ....... 'The theatre is the flashlight for me. It’s done everything for me since I was three years old. I’m not in the playpen now. But I’m still playing.’
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Friday, November 05, 2010
The Importance Of The Private Sector
Image via WikipediaTo me it feels like Bill Clinton makes fun of the United Nations every year. Just when the UN is having its most important week of the year, Bill Clinton goes ahead and hosts his conference and goes on to raise more money for his foundation than is the UN's annual budget. Here is a retired white guy. I mean. The guy should have restructured the World Bank and the IMF when he was president so as to let the Global South have a greater sense of ownership with those global institutions.
All member governments need to give 1% of their GDP equivalent to the UN like citizens pay taxes in democracies.
Like Al Pacino say in a mafia movie, "I will give you money, but not power."
The US continued to not pay the UN what the US owed to the UN in obligations - taxes, if you will - when Bill Clinton was president.
No less than a Nobel Prize winning black woman called Bill Clinton "America's first black president" to honor this white guy from the South who has taken pains throughout his life to go out of his way to try and suggest maybe his heart is alright.
Image by Getty Images via @daylifeHe is not like the white guys who stood in MLK's path every way they could. His heart might be clean, but he did not exactly lead the efforts for structural changes at the global level that might have sped up the process of global poverty elimination.
A few billion dollars raised by the Clinton Foundation or a few tens of billions of dollars raised by the Gates Foundation will, at the end of the day, will not be the decisive blow to global poverty.
Poverty will not be eliminated because some white guys retired. Poverty will be eliminated because many people decided to make careers out of the cause. And perhaps the fundraising efforts send a clear message it is the private sector that will play the decisive role in poverty elimination. There are many for profit ways.
Image via WikipediaPolio could be cured. Poverty can be eliminated. And it can happen faster than many people imagine. 
Friday, September 17, 2010
The Movie Business
If I were not a Third World guy who felt an obligation to save the world - for me the word is not change, it is save, think malnutrition, think infant mortality - I think I might have gone into the movie business. I really like movies. But instead I have put time into politics, which I am really, really good at, and I have put some time into tech. When I have not had the option for tech entrepreneurship - like now - I have focused on tech blogging. Even tech for me has always been politics by other means. I have consistently talked of internet access as the voting right for this 21st century.
I keep having this thought that I want to befriend someone like Matt Damon and say, look, buddy, I don't have the time on my hands to do what you do, but I need you to insert me in your movies, about a minute per movie. That way I can have my cake and eat it too. I can be in the movies while still primarily trying to save the world.
I kid you not, in the Fall of 2007, I spent some considerable time wanting to cut a video clip of me reenacting that early scene in Scarface where Tony is being interrogated. I went ahead and bought the DVDs for study purposes. I should have either not had the strong, recurring thought, or I should have gone ahead and made the video clip and avoided myself a whole lot of hassle eight months later.
In the scene I had in mind, I had Hillary people interrogating me. I had the Obama 08 sticker on my cheek, and that was my scar. I had the DVDs, I had a few Obama 08 stickers in stock just for the purpose. I had my video camera.
“Watch your thoughts, for they become words.
Watch your words, for they become actions.
Watch your actions, for they become habits.
Watch your habits, for they become character.
Watch your character, for it becomes your destiny.”
I won a best actor award in middle school.
How My Grandfather Became Mayor The First Time
One thing I do hope to do a bunch of down the line is video blogging. Vlogging, for short.
I keep having this thought that I want to befriend someone like Matt Damon and say, look, buddy, I don't have the time on my hands to do what you do, but I need you to insert me in your movies, about a minute per movie. That way I can have my cake and eat it too. I can be in the movies while still primarily trying to save the world.
I kid you not, in the Fall of 2007, I spent some considerable time wanting to cut a video clip of me reenacting that early scene in Scarface where Tony is being interrogated. I went ahead and bought the DVDs for study purposes. I should have either not had the strong, recurring thought, or I should have gone ahead and made the video clip and avoided myself a whole lot of hassle eight months later.
In the scene I had in mind, I had Hillary people interrogating me. I had the Obama 08 sticker on my cheek, and that was my scar. I had the DVDs, I had a few Obama 08 stickers in stock just for the purpose. I had my video camera.
“Watch your thoughts, for they become words.
Watch your words, for they become actions.
Watch your actions, for they become habits.
Watch your habits, for they become character.
Watch your character, for it becomes your destiny.”
I won a best actor award in middle school.
How My Grandfather Became Mayor The First Time
One thing I do hope to do a bunch of down the line is video blogging. Vlogging, for short.
Tuesday, August 03, 2010
Vogue India Features Reshma
I dropped by the Reshma 2010 headquarters earlier in the evening to make some phone calls. Usually I email at least one person in the office about a day before. This time my email went to Art. You are trying to make sure they have a phone for you, and on Sundays I get my own computer, on other days they print out names and phone numbers for me. Making phone calls is a workout experience. (Freehand Exercise: 1,000 Push-Ups, 1,000 Squats, 1,000 Crunches) You get better at it over time. People feel the excitement in your voice and they are more likely to say yes, I am voting for her.
Reshma looked like all dressed up and ready to go and I assumed she must have an event to attend somewhere. You should watch her make some of her phone calls. She really gets into the conversation. She can sound so fresh talking to each voter.
And so I am making all these phone calls after phone calls and an hour into the phone calls I notice a copy of Vogue India on the desk. Somebody had just come in and I thought maybe they brought that along. What caught my attention was Abhishek Bachchan and Aishwarya Rai were on the cover of the magazine. A dot com I was part of for a little while in 1999 a year later did an event in NYC, and Aishwarya was the featured person at that event. No, I was not in town at the time. Julia Roberts has called Aishwarya the most beautiful woman in the world. My regard for Abhishek goes via Amitabh Bachchan, my very favorite actor. (Brazil And Argentina: My Choices And Those Of My Favorite Actor) But Abhishek has done some great work in his own right. (Saavn's Great Business Model For Movies)
There is no American equivalent to the Gandhi family of India. There is no American equivalent to Amitabh, although Al Pacino comes close. In terms of what they mean to the Indian imagination.
Ends up Reshma is featured in the same issue of Vogue India, the issue for July. It is a great write up. I kept thinking, we need to scan these three pages and circulate them around.
Reshma looked like all dressed up and ready to go and I assumed she must have an event to attend somewhere. You should watch her make some of her phone calls. She really gets into the conversation. She can sound so fresh talking to each voter.
And so I am making all these phone calls after phone calls and an hour into the phone calls I notice a copy of Vogue India on the desk. Somebody had just come in and I thought maybe they brought that along. What caught my attention was Abhishek Bachchan and Aishwarya Rai were on the cover of the magazine. A dot com I was part of for a little while in 1999 a year later did an event in NYC, and Aishwarya was the featured person at that event. No, I was not in town at the time. Julia Roberts has called Aishwarya the most beautiful woman in the world. My regard for Abhishek goes via Amitabh Bachchan, my very favorite actor. (Brazil And Argentina: My Choices And Those Of My Favorite Actor) But Abhishek has done some great work in his own right. (Saavn's Great Business Model For Movies)
There is no American equivalent to the Gandhi family of India. There is no American equivalent to Amitabh, although Al Pacino comes close. In terms of what they mean to the Indian imagination.
Ends up Reshma is featured in the same issue of Vogue India, the issue for July. It is a great write up. I kept thinking, we need to scan these three pages and circulate them around.
Monday, August 02, 2010
Obama, Reshma
I did not make phone calls for Barack. That is a remarkable thing to say from a guy who was one of Barack's earliest, staunchest supporters in the city, perhaps the country.
I made no phone calls for Barack. Well, not entirely true. Once when they opened up the downtown Manhattan office, I went for a show of support and to get to know the new guy Rudy. And Obama's sister Maya was to show; she gave me the look one Indian gives to another, her name is Indian. (Maya Soetoro-Ng) After she left, and we were just lingering around someone suggested I make phone calls, so I went through the motions for half an hour. People were watching. Then I said how it had been a wonderful experience and I left.
I absolutely refused to sit on committees. I absolutely stayed away from event planning. The primary thing I was doing was I was sucking all emerging details of Obama 08 nationally like a sponge. I was mentally preparing myself to inject in at the pivot points, which I did a few times. I was doing strategic thinking.
Obama 08 was personal therapy. If you had gone to the high school I went to, if you went to the college I went to, you wanted the personal therapy that was Obama 08. I was doing it as much for me as I was for Barack.
I underestimated Barack's positivity message until he started winning race after race after race and I then declared myself a student of his new kind of politics.
I use movie metaphors a lot. It is because my mind works visually. Somebody once asked me, if you speak so many languages, which is the language you think in? I was perplexed. I don't think in languages.
I identify with the Jason Bourne character. In his case, there is amnesia. That is not true for me. But I have had to drop two major institutions from my life like stones into sea water. He kept the skills, the knowledge, but lost memory. He became an operative. There is a one man army element to his ways that I relate to. I am an extremely political person who is not a politician. I can not be a politician. I don't think I much want to either.
Finally I thought I had found a landmass that I could claim: New York City. But the worst experience of my life happened here. I still feel a little disoriented from that experience, emotionally. Charlie Rangel was personally involved in my mess. That made a senior white police officer so happy he declared a "ceasefire" in Harlem for a day. These people never expected to see me ever again, one way or the other. And yet here I am. Africans at college used to ask me jokingly, "You are not black, you are not white, what are you?" Rangel asked the same question, but in a sinister way. I have always thought of Rangel as a third rate political mind, but never underestimate the ferocity of the dumb people.
There is this scene in my favorite movie Heat. The Al Pacino character says he can't share his experiences of witnessing a crime scene, because he needs to preserve that angst, because that keeps him sharp where he needs to be. Someone like me tries to burn the bad experiences in life like it were fuel. You try to burn those memories to try and further sharpen your instincts. But even Jason Bourne tried so hard to reclaim his humanity, and I am no Jason Bourne, I just like the Bourne movies. I have watched them countless times.
What hurts, hurts.
I have thought in terms of getting some counseling, but I have not been excited about the idea. A counselor is not going to have the vocabulary. I am going to have to teach him a new language before he could talk to me. That is not an enticing thought. I have tried writing. It helps, just a little. But not much. I think I might talk.
It is like I have four or five bullet wounds on my left arm. The bullets are still there. The only solace is I know the bullets, I know when I got hit, I have almost a picture perfect memory of getting hit, as if I can replay the movies in slow motion.
1989 was a departure point. 1997 was a departure point. 2008 was a departure point. There have been smaller departure points in between. They stand out like bullets. They sting still. The six months from June to November 2008 were horror. The thing that I had always valued the most, the thing for which I took some major career hits when not exactly having other rosy options, my freedom, they took it away. It was the most unimagined experience, the most unexpected. Before that Nepal was a political laboratory to me, after that America has been a political laboratory to me.
I spend enormous amounts of time online. I think I am searching for a country.
The anti-India sentiment in Kathmandu is too strong, it did not give me space to claim my Indian identity. The British college counselor asked another Britisher in my presence: "Don't you miss it when we used to rule over India?"
Some day I would like to colonize Britain. And Uganda too. Isn't that where Rangel is from?
I have always wanted to become a member of the Indian community in this country, but so far I have not known how. In Richmond, KY, you saw an Indian across the street, and you waved, and they waved back. I tried the same thing in Philly where I was for summer of 1999, and Indians would look at me weird. Do we know each other?
A poet can look at the same leaf and come up with a different thought. When I was gungho about my startup that the Rangel crowd robbed me of, I had started to think, Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard, I never went to Harvard. That makes me one better in the out of the box thinking department. I was thinking of Obama 08 as my personal therapy. Instead it got me cooked, quite literally.
I made very, very few phone calls for Barack. I knocked on extremely few doors for Barack. I got caught, and so I had to do it. As long as the phone calls are being made, and the doors are being knocked upon, I don't have to be the one doing it. That was my attitude.
I have knocked on hundreds of doors for Reshma. I have made hundreds of phone calls for Reshma. The news is not that I have made more phone calls for Reshma than for Obama. The real news is that I have made more phone calls for Reshma than the total number of phone calls I have made in my entire life before that, period. I have not been much of a phone person. For the longest time I did not have a phone. You could also argue for the longest time I have not owned a plane. I have made very few air trips. My first air trip once in America was during the June-November 2008 period; I got reminded I like the views at ground level so much better. Even today I don't have much of a phone. It is a prepaid that has four minutes on it. People will be like, I called you earlier. I am sure you did. I am sure the phone was ringing on my desk. In case you have not noticed, I don't carry my desk around with me. I am a big screen web guy.
I am going to take those bullets out like Rambo. I have to do it myself. They can't stay there forever, festering.
So yesterday I am at the Reshma 2010 headquarters, and a few hours into the show Reshma gets up, walks around and asks the crowd, "Does anyone want coffee?" Next thing you know the entire place has emptied out. I ask the last person out, what's going on? He says, oh, we are all going for coffee. That is the Reshma charisma for you. I did not like the eery silence in the aftermath. But I kept making call after call, because when in motion, I don't feel the pain. When I am calling, when I am blogging, when I am surfing the web, when I am walking, when I am riding the train, I don't feel the pain. It is not even pain most of the time. It is like this lingering bad smell that sometimes give you the headache. You look for the exit and you are out. You get into motion.
I remain someone in pain. I have to figure out a way to work my way through it. My preferred method would be to try and burn all that pain for fuel. But I am not sure that is entirely possible.
I made no phone calls for Barack. Well, not entirely true. Once when they opened up the downtown Manhattan office, I went for a show of support and to get to know the new guy Rudy. And Obama's sister Maya was to show; she gave me the look one Indian gives to another, her name is Indian. (Maya Soetoro-Ng) After she left, and we were just lingering around someone suggested I make phone calls, so I went through the motions for half an hour. People were watching. Then I said how it had been a wonderful experience and I left.
I absolutely refused to sit on committees. I absolutely stayed away from event planning. The primary thing I was doing was I was sucking all emerging details of Obama 08 nationally like a sponge. I was mentally preparing myself to inject in at the pivot points, which I did a few times. I was doing strategic thinking.
Obama 08 was personal therapy. If you had gone to the high school I went to, if you went to the college I went to, you wanted the personal therapy that was Obama 08. I was doing it as much for me as I was for Barack.
I underestimated Barack's positivity message until he started winning race after race after race and I then declared myself a student of his new kind of politics.
I use movie metaphors a lot. It is because my mind works visually. Somebody once asked me, if you speak so many languages, which is the language you think in? I was perplexed. I don't think in languages.
I identify with the Jason Bourne character. In his case, there is amnesia. That is not true for me. But I have had to drop two major institutions from my life like stones into sea water. He kept the skills, the knowledge, but lost memory. He became an operative. There is a one man army element to his ways that I relate to. I am an extremely political person who is not a politician. I can not be a politician. I don't think I much want to either.
Finally I thought I had found a landmass that I could claim: New York City. But the worst experience of my life happened here. I still feel a little disoriented from that experience, emotionally. Charlie Rangel was personally involved in my mess. That made a senior white police officer so happy he declared a "ceasefire" in Harlem for a day. These people never expected to see me ever again, one way or the other. And yet here I am. Africans at college used to ask me jokingly, "You are not black, you are not white, what are you?" Rangel asked the same question, but in a sinister way. I have always thought of Rangel as a third rate political mind, but never underestimate the ferocity of the dumb people.
There is this scene in my favorite movie Heat. The Al Pacino character says he can't share his experiences of witnessing a crime scene, because he needs to preserve that angst, because that keeps him sharp where he needs to be. Someone like me tries to burn the bad experiences in life like it were fuel. You try to burn those memories to try and further sharpen your instincts. But even Jason Bourne tried so hard to reclaim his humanity, and I am no Jason Bourne, I just like the Bourne movies. I have watched them countless times.
What hurts, hurts.
I have thought in terms of getting some counseling, but I have not been excited about the idea. A counselor is not going to have the vocabulary. I am going to have to teach him a new language before he could talk to me. That is not an enticing thought. I have tried writing. It helps, just a little. But not much. I think I might talk.
It is like I have four or five bullet wounds on my left arm. The bullets are still there. The only solace is I know the bullets, I know when I got hit, I have almost a picture perfect memory of getting hit, as if I can replay the movies in slow motion.
1989 was a departure point. 1997 was a departure point. 2008 was a departure point. There have been smaller departure points in between. They stand out like bullets. They sting still. The six months from June to November 2008 were horror. The thing that I had always valued the most, the thing for which I took some major career hits when not exactly having other rosy options, my freedom, they took it away. It was the most unimagined experience, the most unexpected. Before that Nepal was a political laboratory to me, after that America has been a political laboratory to me.
I spend enormous amounts of time online. I think I am searching for a country.
The anti-India sentiment in Kathmandu is too strong, it did not give me space to claim my Indian identity. The British college counselor asked another Britisher in my presence: "Don't you miss it when we used to rule over India?"
Some day I would like to colonize Britain. And Uganda too. Isn't that where Rangel is from?
I have always wanted to become a member of the Indian community in this country, but so far I have not known how. In Richmond, KY, you saw an Indian across the street, and you waved, and they waved back. I tried the same thing in Philly where I was for summer of 1999, and Indians would look at me weird. Do we know each other?
A poet can look at the same leaf and come up with a different thought. When I was gungho about my startup that the Rangel crowd robbed me of, I had started to think, Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard, I never went to Harvard. That makes me one better in the out of the box thinking department. I was thinking of Obama 08 as my personal therapy. Instead it got me cooked, quite literally.
I made very, very few phone calls for Barack. I knocked on extremely few doors for Barack. I got caught, and so I had to do it. As long as the phone calls are being made, and the doors are being knocked upon, I don't have to be the one doing it. That was my attitude.
I have knocked on hundreds of doors for Reshma. I have made hundreds of phone calls for Reshma. The news is not that I have made more phone calls for Reshma than for Obama. The real news is that I have made more phone calls for Reshma than the total number of phone calls I have made in my entire life before that, period. I have not been much of a phone person. For the longest time I did not have a phone. You could also argue for the longest time I have not owned a plane. I have made very few air trips. My first air trip once in America was during the June-November 2008 period; I got reminded I like the views at ground level so much better. Even today I don't have much of a phone. It is a prepaid that has four minutes on it. People will be like, I called you earlier. I am sure you did. I am sure the phone was ringing on my desk. In case you have not noticed, I don't carry my desk around with me. I am a big screen web guy.
I am going to take those bullets out like Rambo. I have to do it myself. They can't stay there forever, festering.
So yesterday I am at the Reshma 2010 headquarters, and a few hours into the show Reshma gets up, walks around and asks the crowd, "Does anyone want coffee?" Next thing you know the entire place has emptied out. I ask the last person out, what's going on? He says, oh, we are all going for coffee. That is the Reshma charisma for you. I did not like the eery silence in the aftermath. But I kept making call after call, because when in motion, I don't feel the pain. When I am calling, when I am blogging, when I am surfing the web, when I am walking, when I am riding the train, I don't feel the pain. It is not even pain most of the time. It is like this lingering bad smell that sometimes give you the headache. You look for the exit and you are out. You get into motion.
I remain someone in pain. I have to figure out a way to work my way through it. My preferred method would be to try and burn all that pain for fuel. But I am not sure that is entirely possible.
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