Fine cotton and leather,

Warm blankets, new tablet,

Soft skin, new hearth,

Old bombs, old refugee tents,

New dictators, old ways,

Old terrors, new tech,

Old borders, new guns,

Cold hearts, warm blood,

Cold streets, warm hearts.

All at the same time.

Why do I say “any film”? I could have said, “any modern substitute for books today”. I could, but film is also symbiotically linked to that unique phenomenon of our times: the online review ratings scale.

I have no issue with film critics. They help popularize films and bring dimensions to an experience that may otherwise be just be a viewing. The good critics (and there are very few) are honored by the film fraternity as people who understand film and contribute to its interpretation. But Manhola Dargis does not go about like IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes reducing commercial art to a rating point.

What does 10/10 mean anyway? Or 1/6? And its not even a “Films by Coppola” rating scale. Its a broad, “I cover everything rating scale”. The viewer’s inherent need for: “Will it be worth my time and money”, has been used to spawn an entire ecosystem of ratings, endorsers for those ratings and the fallout of ratings for films on popular websites. But all said and done, people see them as barometers of what to watch or what to leave for DVD. And if you have time on your hands, chances are you will ignore the rating and go watch that Tom Cruise movie just for the special effects.

But the increasingly commercial, increasingly transactional gaming industry does not stop at that. Game pundits extensively review all kinds of games. Its a prolific output. Games of every genre, on every platform – its as if the game is incomplete if it hasn’t been reviewed (and if its a big franchise – hasn’t been previewed). Here too, game trailers keep teasing you on YouTube for months on end. What is different from the film industry is, however, the ratings system. A review doesn’t count if you haven’t rated it out of 10!!! And if you want to earn true street cred for your review, break the game down further – gameplay, graphics, “presentation”, sound, “storyline” and so on and so forth. And then, at the end of the year, you HAVE to bring out a top 10 and worst 10 games of the year, and set out little mini-tasks like best graphics, best gameplay, best pftt…

We make a huge deal of how we have finally managed to break out of the old “Big Boss – Bigger Boss” approach to games because we transformed them into “sand-boxes”. And then we missed the point altogether. When are we going to let this industry breathe a little bit? When are we going to stop falling into the same traps 20th Century businesses fell into – of churning out stuff that we think people want, when actually they are waiting for you to blow them away? I don’t want a Fifa every year. I don’t need a Modern Warfare every year. Don’t kill yourself selling stuff you know will sell when you do so much better.

And when the odd developer does get it: When they make something the world has never seen before, don’t reduce it to absurd levels every fucking day by giving it rating points on graphics, gameplay and voice. And then comparing that with a completely different game and saying the latter trumps it on all counts.

Because the point you fools, is not that Assassin’s Creed did not introduce dramatic facial expressions, a totally cool interface or beat every graphics output out there this year. The point is that they helped bring an extremely complex science fiction narrative to a close, while giving you hours and hours to do everything that you loved about the franchise in the first place.

Because every Harry Potter book is not rated on a 10 point scale and then ranked on sentence construction, character de-lineation and reader delight every fucking time it comes out. Because what drives the commerce is the art. And if you keep reducing the art into measurable little boxes and numbers, you will end up in the same place my current proffesion has. And I don’t want a second life which mirrors my first.

End of rant.

So imagine how transfixed I was when I was standing in front giant stones hewn by people 3000 years ago, staring into the very gates that Homer’s Greeks had found impossible to break through. And then as the guide unravelled the stories of these walls as we walked around them, touching them, feeling the interlocks of the gigantic stones which had stood against everything Nature and Man had to throw at them – absorbing the fact that these walls were from a later period of Tory’s history, and the city had been first settled over 2 millenia back. Only when I stood in front of old brick homes which were now home only to bees and ants, and archeologists dare not touch them lest they crumble to dust, did it sink in that I was in a truly ancient land. As we walked around the hill ruins, the wind kept battering us and the guide told us about how these winds were the reason Troy was such an unparalleled city. It used to be a port city, situated in a bay that ships used take shelter in before moving on. Those same winds were buffeting the hills and plains of craggy beautiful modern Channakale, home to ancient Trojan aqueducts, Gallipoli, picture postcard clock towers, cobbled streets and Kahve shops. And it was these winds which when they curved around the stones to sweep across your face, carried the whispers of old hearths, echoes of children’s laughter and the screams of dying soldiers.

It was in our very first port of call that I realised why this country was home to the Fertile Crescent. A land very hard to describe in words, because it rests between continents, between adjectives, between Myth and History. Ours was mostly a road trip in German built luxury buses on 4 lane expressways and intersections, but it was just as much a small pilgrimage by two lovers of humanity to old watering holes full of myth and legend. And in the old ruins of Roman and Greek ruins of cities of the erstwhile Asian provinces, we felt the majesty and power of Man’s story. Walking down marble causeways, past Corinthian columns, into a theatre which houses 25000 people – words are of little help.

Those experiences of grandeur and hubris in Ephesus & Heirapolis  also prepared us for the utter sadness and emptiness that filled us when we saw a lone column bearing testament to having once been a part of an ancient wonder of the world – The Temple of Artemis. A single lone column, over-run by wilderness, as Angor Vat once was, only there is nothing left to discover or behold there anymore.And again, in the Hagia Sofia, where we had to imagine the grandeur of the greatest Church in all Christendom, because the vagaries of time and religion have left it little more than a hollow shell.

But it was the story that probably has not been told enough, or a lament that few poems have captured that moved me the most. It was in the surreally beautiful village of Goreme, Cappadocia. We were visiting what, like everything else in Turkey, has been turned into a fanatically preserved museum: The Open Air Cave Museum. But this museum was in fact a vast monastery. Filled with cave chapels and churches that a persecuted people had hewn out of solid rock. The lament of a people driven to live just like in prehistoric times; lives full of the stories of the Bible, thinking of each legend, each character, and using that to survive and prosper against all odds. Living in times which led them to paint on the rock with true devotion and fervour. Such fervour in fact that I have not experienced something so sad and beautiful at the same time, anywhere else. A place of such spiritual power that it stays with you for days after.

The phallic shaped fairy chimneys of volcanic rock make for dwellings and picturesque hotels in Goreme village just a few kilometeres away even today. Except now we have air-conditioning, and heaters and electricity. Making it a major tourist destination. For all the wrong reasons.

There are some things that guide books, Wikipedia, history lessons and most guides do not prepare you for. And for that I am truly glad.

In this country, it is so easy to idealise the past and our agrarian roots. I grew up with this rhetoric, being a Bengali. Of the greatness of Tagore, of the days of the Bengali freedom struggle, of the days when the bhadralok learned English and became  a barrister, but also wore the dhuti, ate on the floor, and touched his mother’s feet before leaving home each morning.

There is much to deride about modern India. We know the words: corrupt, consumerist, inequality, inhuman, rape, exorbitant, overly-rapid, erosion.

I could easily sepia-gold tint these photographs and they would transform into beautiful symbols of a nostalgic idea of Kolkata. Of a Kolkata in touch with its humble roots, where neighbors know each other, where hot food is made for every meal, where everything is sacrificed at the altar of the child’s education, where the simple pleasures of life mean so much…

But in these streets where I help sell hair oil, is there more than this? Is there a similarity to the chawls and slums of Bombay? Are we then, walking around in a city where there is the Bharat, but no sign of India? No sign of a growing corporate meritocracy? No sign of increasing per-capita incomes and widening horizons? Is it a city stuck both with the good and bad of complete middle-class idyll? But what of the BMW’s we see on the streets, and the Fortuners and Range Rovers which just went past. What about Tolly, and Inox? Where are those pictures?

Those who love Kolkata, and understand it, no doubt take beautiful pictures of its people and places which haunt us.

No-one can hope to correctly or accurately capture enough of a city like Kolkata in a poem, post and sometimes even a book. But as a humble observer, in city after Indian city that at least I visit, I find much that disturbs me, and little that brings cheer. Maybe its just me.

Neon signs are not dead…in fact they make the only real landmarks

No-one notices the cemeteries. It’s like they don’t exist

It smells all the time, except when you are home. Even then it smells, but differently

We need sanctuaries, but instead we build walls. And the screens multiply

We don’t look up enough and thank the trees. No-one thanks the trees. You stand under them, you want them around, you look for them, you secretly long for them, you hate them when they are not there. But no-one thanks the trees. No-one touches the trees. We only nail things to them, and prune them when they get cocky, or curse them when they are brittle. We don’t look up enough

We don’t like being touched. We don’t like the glass of our windows touched. Or our knees touched. By them of the streets and the dank open drains

We pretend we know where everything is. But if the lights went out, we wouldn’t survive

We all laugh and we cry and we watch and we live and we breathe together. But we can’t feel each other

We long for open spaces and yet we are happiest with our backs to the wall

We are always awake. Sometimes happy, sometimes restless. But always awake. Even in our dreams we are awake

We are endlessly searching

Neon signs are not dead, in fact they make the only real landmarks

There are few things that smell as peaceful as an infant. It is not about the baby powder. It is this particular ‘milky’ smell that fills an entire baby’s room. Or at least the babies I’ve been around.

Something about smells isn’t there? The important ones fill you up, no matter how faint. And you breathe them in to release this flood of feelings and emotions. Peace, arousal, comfort, coming home.

Voices carry similar codes, but only sometimes. Over the telephone, some voices are not distinct enough to really trigger anything instantly, and only well into the conversation do you start feeling that rush.Which is why, beyond a point, telephone conversations start feeling vaguely unfulfilling.

When photographs or telephones can carry the scents of people and places with them, is when we can truly stop worrying about being far away from someone or something. Until then, I suppose words will have to do.

Neel, you made my evening.

http://skywithoutclouds.blogspot.com/2011/08/turn.html

But back in those days, a pixellated fantasy world based on the myths of the medieval Dark Ages was so wonderfully engaging.

Assassin’s Creed (or for that matter, a whole bunch of its contemporaries) is as much just a video-game, like Diablo or Age of Empires, as Sachin Tendulkar is just a batsman,  or Star Wars just another film.

Instead of getting into adjectives which don’t differ from those of an ecstatic 10 year old, let me try and explain why AC makes 10 year olds and adults alike feel exactly the same.

Time Machine + RPG = A vast canvas spanning centuries

You straddle two realities. Yours, in the present day world (well, close enough). And here’s the cool bit – any direct ancestors, whose life you can live & experience. You can do this via a device called the Animus which can tap into your genetic memory. While most of the ‘action’ is in the past, it is the present which gives the narrative its urgency, and its complexity. It is not about going back into one person’s life and just living out the parts that make it interesting. It is about a quest – going back to piece together a giant puzzle, unravel a global conspiracy.

Hero Myth + Creation Myth + Von Daniken = Classic sf

The events of the story revolve around a conception of the world where two secret societies have been at war with each other since Mankind came into existence. They are fighting for the future direction they want to take humanity in and it all links back in some way to an advanced intelligent civilisation which lived on Earth before the humans – the Gods that so many mythologies refer to.And the only way in which all this can come to any good, is if one, previously ordinary, nondescript, clueless man can tap into his ancestors’ lives, piece the clues together against all the odds and make it all worthwhile.

Inception + Parkour + Ancient cities + Open World Gaming + Modern graphic engines = Being teleported and not just transported into another world.

Video games have often been called immersive. That is what they are supposed to do, fundamentally. Transport you from your world into another. AC teleports, rather than transports. Everything is done in a way that you start navigating an ancient city when it was not ancient. Props are not just props but can be pushed over, and broken. While parts of the city are progressively ‘unlocked’, it is done in a way that you feel it is more the Animus than the video-game that is responsible. Apart from that, you can go anywhere, do anything literally. The rooftops, the cross on top of the tallest spire, the bridge, the window-sill, the cobbled street, the cave, the secret tunnel, the market, the rolling hill-side, the river, the canal. Anything. Literally.

The incredible thing AC achieves is that when you are playing it, you are Desmond of the present world, transported into a different era, into the body of a different person. So you are twice removed. And so the illusion only breaks when you directly play Desmond. Its like Inception.

And to top it all off, a glorious “Viewpoint” system where you climb the tallest structure of the area to get a pre-rendered panorama of the city as it once was. Just this one thing gives me so much. I can intuitively tell how different landmarks are placed in reference to each other, what they looked like with ordinary buildings and streets around them. And then I can perform a “Leap of Faith” down into a haystack which looked like a small yellow dot from up there. And when I emerge I can walk around the building like a tourist, taking it in from all angles.

Massive = Second Life

AC is huge. There is more information there than you can take in even with 2 full, patient rounds of playing it from start to finish. The landmarks and their names, all historically accurate. The back-stories of the characters as depicted. And the real back-stories that you can research when you are not playing it. The main quest, side-missions, treasures and puzzles. The sheer amount of playtime you use up just taking in all the sights and sounds, the feel of the city at dawn and at dusk, that last viewpoint you haven’t yet climbed…

And all of this through the eyes of one person. So that there is a lasting emotional connect. The characteristic walk, the re-supplying at the guilds, the weapon and armour upgrades, the different painting you can buy, all of which are real Renaissance paintings. You spend time with Ezio (and to a lesser extent with Altair). Enough to really start rooting for him.

Art Direction

In ‘video-games’, the true difference between something that gets under your skin, and something that you play for a while and forget, is art-direction. And in this matter, pictures tells much better stories.

Which brings me to my concluding point. Video games are no longer video games. Yes they are, when you refer to the ones that are currently ‘revolutionizing’ the industry on iPhone and Android. I have nothing against Angry Birds. But if you want to port seriously old concepts to new interfaces and pretend that this is what the future is, then you are dead wrong. The future is in the way that the gaming industry is changing the way that traditional media told a narrative. It is not just about interaction versus a linear structure. It is about open structures and game worlds versus film worlds and book worlds. Can the 3 co-exist? Sure. The biggest franchises live on all 3 platforms. But the question is, which one leads which.

My bet is that soon, with more and more games like AC, it is going to be predominantly the game. Things can only get better. People will still keep thinking that the game lies in making better and more interesting interfaces. How can I not use a controller, but my whole body to play a game, like i do in the real world. But ultimately, the buck stops at the mind. It is the experience. And nothing drives experience like a good story told well that I can influence and truly feel a part of.

The older I get, the further I get from being a free radical. Free, objective thought. In whatever relative form. But still ‘free’. Now I am a shell of that scepticism. Bloated with my personal ego and pegged down by the relationships I have built with the city of my choice, I am a true armchair intellectual; picking up the lenses I am comfortable wearing. Sometimes rose tinted, sometimes far-sighted, sometimes just plain lazy.

Blinded by a work ethic & culture that emulates Western ones, I have begun to think that Bombay is India. Or at the very worst that Bombay is what the rest of India is moving towards, some parts faster, some slower. I rage and rant about the North East. I croon about Goa and Bandra. I relish my exotic coffee beans, my little corners of South Indian cuisine, my lanes of cobbled streets lined with gulmohars and copper pods, my salt-air drives down the length of the Metropolis after midnight. I walk crowded streets with my Springsteen plugged in, and I am in Jersey heaven.

So when I walked into that nameless ‘house’ in the heart of Uttar Pradesh, I started breaking down inside. I found it impossible to assimilate. All day, I yearned for the calm of clattering keys to pour out my emotions, but by night-time, I was too tired to even attempt anything. What kept assaulting me was that I was a domicile of North India. I grew up with the front door opening into squalour, poverty and hunger. I grew up with cows littering roads and alleys. I grew up knowing that cow-dung was India’s version of water-puddles. I grew up playing near the same areas where women who were too poor to clothe themselves decently lived. I grew up knowing I could never hit a woman, while almost daily, a few walls away a drunk, unemployed husband would threaten and abuse & throw around his wife, the only earning member of a large, hungry family. The duality was supposed to be ingrained.

But, even then, it was hard to handle. It was hard to accept how far removed I had become from the true condition of my own country. The physical aspects were just a fraction of my discomfort. I adapted to it almost naturally, like shedding a skin and slipping back into an old one. I could handle the open drains running into houses, vehicles and beds co-abiding, ‘load-shedding’, an invasion of flies and mosquitoes. What I could not handle was the callousness of the oppression that everyday women in that town faced. I could not handle the Stockholm Syndrome that almost all of them seemed to suffer from. At how main-stream and self-feeding this creature was. The more I heard, the more I wanted to throw up.

Humen toh…allow nahin hai.

Young women, much younger than me – with children and in-laws to feed, clothe, pick-up after, abide and appease. Young women after women, who flash on a ghoonghat the minute a man enters, who look at everything in life via just 2 filters, and 2 filters alone – permissible and impermissable. Women with wit, verve and M.A’s, who do not step out of the house, unless accompanied by the husband or the mother-in-law. Their pets have more freedom. Live lives far more whole and sane.

Each one had back-stories of education cut short, of being married off, unloaded. The demonised ‘sasural’ is all-too-often far more humane than her own ‘maika’. Any woman who tried to break loose was just that – loose, immoral.

Woh toh…, yeh sab toh…

The rhetoric of the patriarchs enforced to a point where the price of deviation is costly enough to mean you go from being a nameless unpaid resource to ‘trouble’, your children possibly singled out, whispers everywhere you go.

A world where she is either un-married – being bred for the slaughter, or kept – either with social sanction, oftentimes without; she dreams of bringing her daughter up as an equal to the man, and then smiles wistfully at the pipe-ness of that dream. And all the time, she talks of how much times have changed, how her mother was married at 14, how she at least continued her studies after marriage, how she is almost certain her daughter will be allowed to work.

During each interview, I would often lose my entire chain of questioning because she would agree to the importance of ‘staying within limits’, or about the importance of ‘upholding Bharatiya sanskriti’ with such earnestness and conviction, that my inner anger and frustration would overwhelm me completely.

——————————————

The solution is not more education. The solution is not better education. The problem goes too deep. Education, economic development, these things are fucking placebos. In fact, so many of them were allowed to work only when economic conditions were bad enough that she just had to compromise ‘family duties’ and was allowed to work. Anecdotal and circumstantial, you say? Visit Eastern UP sometime. The disease was just naked and open there. It thrives here in Bombay too.

Packing all of your belongings suddenly compresses memories long buried and forgotten, and puts them into the same space as the ones you tap into often. You remember how you felt when you played a song for the first time. Or why you replayed it. What you were doing. How the floor felt as you lay on it. How the trees swayed while the ants passed by. The short-hand that is music acts like your head’s personal spool. And your past feels more coherent. More whole.

Of course, technology today allows for you to do this everytime you turn on your iPod and hit shuffle on your entire playlist. Chances are though, that you won’t come across that particular album or song. Or be patient enough to wait for it. Because unlike sifting through a box, an iPod follows mathematical randomness. It doesn’t care if you cried to a TEB song it just skipped past, or that you never cared much for Daft Punk. Sometimes its a heady trip, sometimes its crap.

But move houses often enough, or maybe just redecorate and re-arrange and I promise you, you will be amazed at the things you find that are covered with dust physically, but virtually untouched in that magic box inside by anything the Universe can throw at it.