Hmm

Is theatre ,and art in general, necessarily, deliberately, inherently complicated? Or is it that I am a simpleton?
I suspect the latter.
I went for Ratan Thiyam's Nine Hills One Valley yesterday, and was very confused, Not to mention that I do not understand Manipuri. The overhead translations were woefully inadequate, with 5 rapid emotive sounding dialogs being translated into one tame explanatory subtitle.

So, is there hope for the world, or are we doomed even if the wise men of yore give us new directions? Or have we become so helpless that we cannot take responsibility for bettering our own lives? Time is a demon! I do not really agree. I think we demonize Time. It's our fault.

Ok, so I am realy blabbering here. Bottomline being, that the deeper political, sociological philosophies being expressed went over my simple head, so I stuck to enjoying the accompanying music compositions from some exotic Indian instruments, the grace and fluidity of the rich Manipuri dance-form and some of the exotic sword wielding martial-art type sequences.

Time and politics can wait.

"Presenting" my best foot forward

All I have been doing in the past two weeks is reading papers, and more papers, and more papers, and putting together, hold your breath, a 12 minute-12 slide talkfor a conference in Montreal next week. Who knew that it could take so much effort to do that, to have a background, or at least pretend to have background knowledge for every figure, every word, every bullet point.
Last night, I got onto Googletalk for the first time, so that I could communicate real-time with one of the authors for this paper I am presenting.
Getting online, got one of my former colleagues in the company I worked at to ping me. And he was surprised that I was spending so much time on this presentation, knowing that I could whip out reams of such material for training and clients at the drop of a hat.
But this is different. No one has done it before. Here one is not trying to teach or market. One is trying to Prove oneself. It is Personal.