A lot depends on the way you look at it.....

I never knew that so much of thought process can run in a non-movie maker's mind, until this afternoon, when I chanced to listen to Preran Kurnool ( Yes, I have taken his permission to use his name). He works with Adobe as a technical communicator and the gathering was about technical writing.

Though I wanted to keep this blog completely away from technical writing, this one post calls for a brief description of what we do at our work desks. We write documents that ship with the software or hardware. So, as you can imagine, it is definitely not a 'Cool' desktop or a 'Sleek' phone or a 'fantastic' interface. We write facts and say a desktop, a phone or an interface. We don't really dictate what the user thinks about the product at hand. We just say what we have to say. That is the kind of profession we are in and partly why my writing does not have bombastic and beautiful words in the posts. The whole audience had the same base in their day-to-day jobs and we did not know what was coming when Preran started talking about writing for movies.

While my intent in this post is not to describe every detail of what he covered I must say a few things that caught my attention:

- I can never dissect a movie's aspects - Artists, their appearance, the scene, the language, the emotions, the story, the costume, the sets, the locations and the camera angle, the way he did.

- For the first time I consciously realized that passion is what drives anyone to where ever his level of achievement is. If you like something, you are sure to pay attention to every detail. if gardening is your favorite past time, may be you should go ahead and explore more about pesticides or floral arrangement or maintaining a garden or conduct an observation study on a specific species. Why? You never know where this effort can lead. For all you know, you could come up with something that is positive and unheard of, in the field that you are working on. Well, what follows is : Fame, Name, Business proposals, and in some cases, the true satisfaction of doing your best and seeing the results benefit someone or something.

Not that I can't rattle off the names of a lot of movies right now, but it surely is difficult to relate a concept that you are talking about to one or more movies that fall into the same pattern. Preran spoke quite a bit about Dilwale, Dulhainyan Le Jayenge ( DDLJ), a Hindi movie starring Sharukh Khan and Kajol. I have watched the movie at least thrice ( which is very rare for someone like me, who can say a movie's story in three minutes time and can't really spend another two plus hours watching the same thing) but never once thought of it the way Preran stated it . He says it is a logical formula movie. Now, that's one term I can really relate, because that is what we do in IT industry. There is a logic and there is a set pattern ( formula, so to say) in the way we do work. He was able to classify movies into a few categories and I am very sure at least 90% of the movies will fall into one or the other category.

- I probably would not rate a movie useless or pointless or a waste of time once again in my life, because, I realized it is sometimes worth looking for a single plus point in a maze of minus points. If you are a little old enough, you might probably advice me to apply it to life and people I meet as well.. ( Am seriously considering, anyway.. :-)

I thought of a non-IT professional friend of mine who can just recollect a movie sequence and for some of her favorite movies, even the dialogues!!!! Unbelievable aptitude, I would say.. Such people can actually get into screen play writing.I must write to her about this.... Another hard core software professional friend of mine can tell the story of a three hour movie for four hours ( the extra one hour is invested in setting the stage or context for you and answering your doubts - words cant replace a picture or an emotion, so that kind of needs quality time in her opinion ). I sincerely think, if she were to consider screen play writing, most of our movies today, would look a lot better stage-decorated and cut really well for today's world.

Like, I said, I do not have the capacity to express what I heard, the way I heard from Preran, but I can surely say I learnt this:

Don't let a single interest of yours unexplored.

Nothing will happen if you dont invest that energy and time, but if you do, you will be amazed at the results, even if it is not what you wanted.

There is more to life and things than what we think we know.

It just takes a small object, subject, concept, pattern that interests us to make our life very different from what we can imagine.

Invest quality time in your hobby.

Even if it seems aimless, do it for yourself and the feel-good factor in you.

Work gradually towards expanding your interests outside your mind-set and you never know where that can take you.

Out of the Box thinking exists afterall.

There is no such thing in life as 'I have nothing to do' even when you decide to retire from your work life!!!!

There must be something very special about you, else you would not be here!!!! Seek help in finding it, if you cannot identify it yourself.

A lot of us say, jobs are becoming monotonous, boring, and we all know Monday mornings do not make us feel so good... I believe that we all should do something that interests us, just to keep our work going well, our feel-good factor levels high, our attitude towards life good and may be at a later date, and share lessons with folks who need to know.

Lastly, if there is a way to monetize what we have spent time on, and if there are no personal sentiments attached ( some people dont sell art) why not go ahead and make the spent time look like invested time? [Time investments are subject to risks. Read the mental/emotional note carefully before investing. Spend calculated and balanced time to avoid conflicts of any kind at work and home!!!!!]