The Adaptation Obsession (Dated:11 July, 2010)

This article is 4 years old. it was published in the Sunday Plus magazine of The Nation.
Just sharing it here to add to my list of write ups.

"Adapted screenplays are plays which adapts its story from another source like a novel, another short play etc. Many of Hollywood screen writers get their inspiration from such sources. Infact some of the most acknowledged movies are adapted. The recent trend in Hollywood has been of adapted screenplays and they are widely acclaimed and gain widespread fame. The Oscars have a separate award for adapted screenplays with Precious (adapted from a novel Push) winning the Best Screenplay Award in the 82nd Academy awards.

A wide majority of movies that won awards in 2009, in different categories, have been adapted screen plays:  Mo’Nique won the best supporting actress for the movie Precious (adapted from a novel “Push” by Sapphire)

in Golden Globe and the 82nd Academy Awards, Up in the Air ( adapted from a movie with the same name by Walter Kim)

won the Best Screenplay in Golden Globe Awards and Jeff Bridges won the best actor award for his role in the film Crazy Heart (adapted from a novel of the same name by Thomas Cobb)

 in Golden Globe and the 82nd Academy Awards.

The past years have been full of popular adapted screenplays: The reader, Curious Case of Benjamin Button

and Revolutionary Road in 2008; Atonement, No Country for old men and Sweeney Todd in 2007 and The Departed,

The Last King of Scotland and Dream girls in 2006. This is just a few of a long list of movies which have adapted its story from different sources.

Certain adapted screenplay movies are very different from the original stories; the popular book Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown, disappointed its readers when the movie came out in May 2006.

Not just the movie it self but the change in the story at certain stages, perturbed the viewers who loved Da Vinci Code as a book. But Hollywood is also full of popular adapted screen plays like Star Trek, Lord of the Rings, Shrek, and the very recent Harry Potter, which surpassed all the previously listed movies’ popularity.

The Twilight series is yet another example of successful adapted screenplays.

 It is a fantasy, romance thriller with majority of the fans lying in the age group 16-25 years, making it the number#1 movie in America in 2008. Its sequel New Moon, released in November 2009, has the sixth highest worldwide opening weekend title and Eclipse, the third in the twilight saga, is one of the most awaited film of 2010.

Adapted screenplays are viewers’ top choice now days. The majority of the viewers lie between the age group of 13-30, and these people enjoy fantasies and bookish thrillers more than an original script. Ask a 18 year old girl whether she prefers Hurt Locker, which is an original screenplay, or New Moon, which is an adapted screenplay; she will vote for New Moon.

People enjoy watching what they have read; it gives a new direction to their imagination and sketches a fine picture of their imaginings in their mind. For those who don’t read much a simple tag of ‘adapted from a best-selling novel’ is enough to attract them towards the movie.

So for all the directors out there go for a screenplay that adopts its story from a novel or any other similar source, it’s not only cheap its but also the viewers top choice nowadays!"

Pros and Cons of a 9 to 5 job for a fresh graduate

So, you have just completed your graduation from a well reputed university. You have had an amazing student life, good friends, awesome teachers and excellent grades which, according to you, look good on your CV. Now you have earned a good job, and you think you deserve it. You start your professional life with the same zeal and fervour you have carried out your studies your whole life and expect the same results.

But after some time, operating in the professional environment, you sit back and have to think a few things over. And here is gist of, not all, but major scenarios of what the corporate environment makes you.

Pros:

1. You are young, enthusiastic and eager to prove yourself. No matter how hard your job is, the feeling of self accomplishment on landing a good job, in a well reputed organization, surpasses all achievements.

                                 

2. You get to manage your own finances which makes you realize your preferences in life.
3. You get the independence you have dreaded your whole life.

4. You realize how hard it is to earn money; hence you start cutting back on you lavish and irrelevant expenditures; you start respecting your parents more and more as you realise how hard it has been for them to support your expensive education, hi-fi life style and irritating tantrums for irrelevant and overly high priced items, especially gadgets like I phones and tablets.
5. You feel happy on every accomplishment at work and feel content about your life and career.
6. Every day you have something to wake up to: another assignment, a office get together, a presentation; which is always better that having nothing on schedule and no motivation to wake up to. You have a good routine.
7. You become a practical and a  rational person who makes decisions carefully and takes calculated risk not only in professional but in personal life too.
8. Your parents, siblings and relatives start respecting you and give value to your opinion and ideas as you have stepped in practical life and all of a sudden considered sensible.

Cons:


1. After a few of months, with your liberty of doing whatever you want to do gone, you start feel like you are caged by the clock. You become a servant of time.


2. You actually realize what the statement "Tomorrow is Monday again" means. In real.

3. You get sick and tired of proving yourself again and again and yet again and all the reward you ever get is another tough assignment.

4. You come to the conclusion that the definition of independence, you have always imagined, is totally incorrect and what you have is an independently dependent life which is even worse.

5. You feel taken aback by the reality of life when you get to experience, first hand, all the hard cruel realities of life and people, your professors and parents warned you about.

6. Your social life dies.

7. You start missing out on a lot of things in life like friend's surprise birthdays, parent's anniversary dinners and long chats with friends and spouses because you have a video call, late at night, with seniors/colleagues and/or customers living in a different time zone or your boss have given you a deadline you have to meet which calls for endless late sittings and continuous over time at work

8. You finally come to the conclusion that grades really don't matter when you see the so-called-dumbest kid of class, if not doing better, than equal to you in his career which is disappointing.


Yes, all of you can relate to a lot of the above points. But this list does not mean that you have become a complete 9 to 5 freak or your life couldn't be better cos you work in an amazing company.
It just means everything in life has, both, an upside and a downside and one cannot reap all the benefits without experiencing the downsides. 

Puppets of Society!

 

Puppets of the society

We all are puppets of the society. We act the way the society wants us to act. We live the way the society wants us to live. We see what the society wants us to see. We feel what the society wants us to feel and we hear what the society wants us to hear.

Society here does not represent any big players or an influential party, it means we all. You, me, the person sitting next to you right now, your next door neighbour, a random girl from a restaurant…everyone is society. Individuals like you and me make up the society.

No matter what our values are, what we think and no matter what we believe is right, we all end up acting the way the society demands from us. Haven’t you stopped laughing loudly in a gathering, just because people eye you strangely? Even though you are just acting out of the moment, but the dubious eyes of people around you made you change habits. Making you act the way the society wants you to act.

You can not wear a burka, just because you don’t want to be the target of everyone’s judgemental microscopic eyes. And eventually you think otherwise and disregard the thought. Hardly 1 percent of the ladies have the courage to face the world. The rest are just victims of the society becoming yet another puppet. Eventually making you live the way the society wants you to live.

You think a million times before hanging out with your friends of the opposite sex, just because such mixed crowds of young people have been stereotyped by the your society. It not just makes you change your plans but it also changes your perception. You also start looking at such mixed crowds of young people the way society sees and eventually you became the victim of seeing what the society wants you to see.

Society Taught Me

Haven’t you joined the gym, or considered going to a gym because you think you are over-weight. Infact it’s not because you think you are over-weight, it’s because the society makes you feel that way. The people around you make you feel like an outcast just because you are a little different in terms of body shape and size. In reality you might not be overweight, but just because you are not like them you are forced to feel like an outcast and consider becoming like them. And again you end up becoming a puppet of the society forcing you to feel the way it wants you to feel.

No matter what we claim or what we think, we end up doing what the 

SOCIETY WANTS US TO DO!

I HAVE NO TITLE: Growing Old ?

I HAVE NO TITLE: Growing Old ?: Do we really grow old or we just learn to accept the realities of life? Have you ever thought that if it had not been for the ups and dow...

I HAVE NO TITLE: Illusion

I HAVE NO TITLE: Illusion: Living is all about moving on and letting go. You cannot hold on to a person or an emotion or one single activity or a luxury forever. You...

Growing Old ?

Do we really grow old or we just learn to accept the realities of life?

Have you ever thought that if it had not been for the ups and downs along with the happy and harsh times/events of life, you  might still be living as a teenager or a child. Does this brain of ours also grows old with us or is it the experiences of life that gives our brain this maturity?

What if we stop thinking and do whatever we want to do, irrespective of our age, gender, class and religion? People will call us crazy. Well of-course. If they see 30 year old fully grown up man taking rides in McDonalds play area people WILL call him crazy. People believe what they see. What they don't know is that he is following his heart, doing whatever he wants to do and enjoying. Ask yourselves, if you see a Muslim praying to Jesus or praying in a Hindu Temple you will think he/she has lost it. You believe what you see. You will start judging him/her because of his actions. What you might not know, that he is just doing it out of curiosity or just to witness other religion's ceremonies and to compare them with his/hers.

This all depends upon what you think. If you start caring about these judgmental eyes of people around you you will stop doing what your heart wishes. Then you eventually learn that one cannot do what he/she wishes or wants. That is the time your thoughts change direction. Its not the brain that grows old its your thoughts that change lanes. And these thought are not in born. this is what you learn during the course of life.

So whatever you are today is what you choose to be.

Illusion

Living is all about moving on and letting go. You cannot hold on to a person or an emotion or one single activity or a luxury forever. You eventually have to let go. You cannot count on to anyone or any luxury of the world. You are, you have been and you will forever be alone! In the back of your mind, in your subconscious, your mind knows this fact pretty clearly. It’s just that you create associations with multiple things and ignore this basic knowledge. It’s these associations that make it difficult to let go and move on. It’s the expectations that creates problems for us and we keep on living with the same feelings and avoid letting go. And honestly, these associations, expectations are all just an illusion created by yourself in your mind. Once you decide something with a clear mind and focus on it, no other force of the world can stop you from following your decision. Your mind is a very powerful gift from God; we just don’t use it sensibly. We live in a life of illusions created by ourselves in our mind due to which we suffer. And again this suffering is all an illusion. You feel genuine pain for a specific time period but the endless suffering and pain is all just an illusion due to which we hurt ourselves.

Shake off all these illusions from your mind and then look at life and think what you can do and what you can’t. Trust me you will come up with a long list of “dos”. It is also the only way of finding out what you are capable of!