Books, Movies and Cages

Ma'am asked why are you so philosphical? What all books do you read?

Here is my answer -

My life is the best book of mine whose writer is not only me but everybody who has a direct or indirect influence on it and its readers? I read it everyday and add to it more as time progresses. Its public to all those who want to read it. They can add the lines they like to their own book from mine without any copyright issues. :)

Now the question comes where from I take my lines and add to my own book. I steal them from others' lives thriving freely in my surroundings or dead and caged in the books in form of biographies, poetry, plays and movies (screen cage) which are not only about just one life but a confluence of many lives the protagonist(s) comes in touch with.

Digressing a bit from this to bring movies (one of my obsessions) in the context...
-----------------

Movies? Caged lives kept on display, lives which cannot do anything when people peek into their privacy and cry/laugh/abuse them sitting in the hall. Neither the viewers help those characters prisoned in the screen. Many-a-times the one caged behind the screen also mock the viewers. For that matter we can say that in a way the viewers are also caged.

We can also redefine the movies about those lives who have got freed from the cage of this world. They try to make us feel that we are in a cage. Sometimes they share the experiences when they were in a cage. Sometimes they do things which we say are not possible in reality. But reality in a way is a prison where you can't do everything you wish because there are some rules of the cage you are in.

So, who is in the cage is a question pretty much debatable... Maybe both are in cages but its just like the rules of each cage are different. There are things you can do and there are things you can't. For that matter in our so called real world, we have many different cages...cages of society, culture, religion blah blah blah... In all this one thing is for sure common, the person who lives in these cages and the person who creates/destroys these cages is the same... MAN (to be more general - a living being)

Irony is that many-a-times people built cages for themselves.... Why?
Maybe to have a sense of security...
Maybe to work in isolation to achieve something...
Maybe this is a better thing to use their creativity on...

.......... endless reasons .......

a difficult question for me to handle in its entirety... i mean to say i cannot even catch a snapshot of the expanse of its answer.... In short, I don't see myself capable enough of doing justice to this question
---------------

Above text Originally written on April 10, 2005

• This short film came in an email forward today. It is to some extent related to this blog.
  
• Came across this thought today relevant to this blog.
  These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves.
  
  -Gilbert Highet, writer (1906-1978)