The Uglies ( A review)

I made the mistake of reading the reviews of the movie ‘Uglies’ that I saw on Netflix and was shocked to come across hugely negitive ones. It was disheartening. How could we miss out on the deeply layered message that was meant to safeguard us from the soon to be incorporated doom into our lives? 

Doesn’t the movie talk about the essential sense of ugliness that we inherit from our collective unconscious and the environment that locks us into feeling that way about us. I was a “pretty” kid and grown up but never really knew that I was, and had a serious lack of self esteem because of that. So if the director here has chosen Joey King as the protagonist who sees herself as ugly, what makes it so difficult to miss that point that is being conveyed here? In a society where even the so-called good looking are infected with the virus, what to talk of those who are not so, so-called-endowed externally?

Uglies (based on the popular dystopian young adult novel by Scott Westerfeld) is set in a futuristic world where everyone undergoes extreme cosmetic surgery at the age of 16 to become "Pretties." This surgery enhances their physical features to a standard of flawless beauty, following the society's rigid ideals. Before the surgery, individuals are addressed "Uglies" and live in designated areas away from the perfect "Pretties."

This society values conformity and beauty above all, seeing physical imperfections as something to be fixed, even at the cost of individual identity and freedom.

The story follows Tally Youngblood, a teenage girl who is eagerly awaiting her own transformation and how she eventually undergoes the paradigm shift. 

In the movie we see that the moment people undergo these “procedures” they are shown as having been rendered desensitized, which to me is such a profound metaphor. I wonder if that has been missed out on by most of the people who care to put out their scathing criticism, without using the faculty of correct critical thinking! Don't we see that happening around us all the time? The class consciousness that we all have; the superiority and inferiority thing that hounds us all our lives for all these factors: money; beauty; intelligence; talent…everything here is a resource to climb the social ladder to prove that we are somebody…the traps that are laid all around us and the propensity with which we allow ourselves to be imprisoned by them. And how this blind clinging to such ideas is so depriving us of the real sensitivity towards life and our fellow mates that we miss out on totally. 

A few months after my young, intelligent and “pretty” elder daughter had flown to the US for her further studies, one of the pictures that she shared, I was a little crestfallen to see her resembling the newbies: that blondish adapted look: with those golden streaks in her hair. A look that had filled me with a sense of despondency to the choices that mostly we the female gender were making inadvertently to offer ourselves as the most well packaged and glamorous consumable items. The latest and most dreadful casualty in the growing trend of new age consumerism.

My younger one had fallen into the trap in a more alarming way.Tall, intelligent and “beautiful”, yet having acquired the need to push the envelope further into some unrealistic standards of beauty, disseminated by the nasty fashion and cosmetic industry (which is far more lethal than it looks). After trying all the possible ways, we as parents were watching with muffled breaths her gradual but adamant steps into the precarious precipice of size zero mold. She could have fallen on the other side from that ledge any time… Can’t be thankful enough to the universe for having visited her brain with a sharp lightning like streak of wisdom, one fine day when she fell unconscious due to prolonged deprivation of food. With none of us at home, she having to deal with that situation on her own geting to confront what she was doing to herself, somehow propelled her into a conclusive clarity of the havoc this was doing to her system. She decided to take a u turn from there, for it was now or never as i believe she saw it then. 

Then there was this show I saw recently on Netflex: The Perfect Couple; wherein the famous and talented actress Nocole Kidman is such a manicured mannequin version of herself. Throughout the show there's not a single place we see her beam a full smile (which i wonder is more a demand of the character or the botox that she has in the lips and the chin, with a compulsive pout pasted on them most disquietingly. Why? For it is imposing those fake ideals upon the more impressionable minds, to buy these as the standards of real beauty, when actually it is the farthest cry from being authentic/ beautiful) It scares me to imagine the world we are heading…Hardly any of the actresses out there who have not been a victim to this going under the scapell to come back with a synthetic look that they compel themselves to believe is a better version of themselves! 

To me it is against this backdrop that this movie comes as a bolt of fresh whiff of replenishing oxygen. There are certain sane voices that are ranting the truth away at most affordable and nominal prices in this noisy bazaar of the overbearing false and the fake, masquerading as the true! Irony is that we opt for the fake and more exorbitantly priced alternatives. I feel very inspired by the likes of Julia Roberts’ who I am sure is managing without botox and beams that widest of the smiles most unabashedly, which is what I believe makes her more beautiful than what is seen as beautiful. 

Scott Westerfield in his novel ‘Uglies’, talks about these very developments through a poignantly impactful metaphor. 

I recall that around the 1990’s corrective teeth procedures were already quite an in thing. My teeth which were in that category needed that, but my father didn't see it as important. I spent a lifetime staying quite conscious of my teeths slight protrusion. Another cousin of mine who was quite pretty otherwise had her teeth definitely demanding the corrective procedure,  more than mine, but missed out on hers as her parents couldn’t afford it, and we were still in the middle middle class upbringing where things like these weren't and couldn’t have been a priority. I always felt it was so unfair on that girl to have been left the way she was and not been awarded the procedure so she could be such an amazing version of herself. Now put all these real life examples of the likes of us: such ordinary mortals who are stuck with one or the other body part being way out of their acceptance levels. I am sure the data shall prove to be nearly 100%. Now if I had the clarity of the facade not being as important as we have been made to believe it is, I wouldn’t have spent a lifetime seeing myself as anything lesser than anybody else around me.  

In today's society when almost 50-80 % of our bodies are alterable, is it sane to go for it or know that the buck never stops! It shall be a never ending ordeal, once trapped inside the bubble that promises the utopian possibility to one’s vulnerable mind. Those doll-like superimposed thick lips pasted hanging upon old ones is a most deplorable replication of God’s expertise. And the escapism that it sneakily offers to the scared mindsets, who want to prolong their innings here are being the most ruthlessly exploited by the new age consumerism that is most voraciously feeding upon them. As long as we are falling victim to the hands of that science which has always been thoroughly misused to play God, we shall be the most pathetic guinea pigs in the race to sustain that which is universally most fleeting: the idea of external beauty; young age.   

It may be easier to intellectualize upon it than to avoid the temptation of going for it if one has the means to, like Dr Faustus asking for the extension of 25 years of young age with all the extreme pleasures at his disposal in exchange of his soul! People needed to get the multi layered metaphor to go back satiated from a wonderful piece of art like this. We need some evolution at the hands of literature. No wonder I always felt that exposure to classic literature was as imperative as the daily food that we need to consume for the upkeep of our bodies. For a healthy body cannot be shielded for long with a mind not up to safeguarding itself against wrong  influences.  

We got to be using our critical thinking skills effectively

 

Had an interaction with this theatre person who also writes some interesting shayari. One statement that he made about himself was how Bolliwood was a major influence upon his mind in his growing up years. How he grew up internalising the flimsy superficial values that are absorbed from there. My mind quickly connected this to an interaction with another so called intellectual who had the honesty to admit that his world view was formed by the movies of his generation, which is at least 3.5 decades behind! Wasn't this data enough for me to come to deduce that we as a society are largely leading orphaned existances: for our own families have failed us to be raised with a mindset that has a standing of its own and thus can sift authentic from the trash.

Yesterday post watching this movie 'Animal', i was aghast that stuff like this is not only just being churned out, but is being consumed with a voracious appetite!! The absolutely baseless mindless violence that has been given a heroic status, the comedy that was nothing but crass; the narrative technique that was somehow managed as madly as possible. 

Actors with a lot of potential should have the integrity to resist being a part of such atrocious cinema! I was super annoyed with Ranbir kapoor! I expect so much better from him! Even the way the love has flowered out between him and his wife-to-be in the movie was totally pathetic! If a man was to qualify himself in the eyes of a woman with stuff like this, then I wonder if God too could save the entire feminine race! Ok, she leaves him in the end, but the very reasons of choosing a man like him in the first place is what i am raising a question at. "you have a wide pelvis" says the hero to the heroine, only to clarify that she will bear good offsprings, effortlessly delivering them!" This is a reason enough for her to fall totally head over heals in love with him. Whatever else was offered to woo her was is so flimsy as a means to reinforce him as husband material, that it is all so bewildering to imagine we as a society are allowing ourselves such junk!  

Why should I have such a strong opinion!?" "its only just a movie! You are supposed to see it all with putting your head elsewhere; or not put too much head to it." Wish I could convince myself with arguments like these! But the fact that there's thousands and millions in this country who are so impressionable and take away all this crap to internalize! We are not just allowing, but ensuring that we are nurturing our youth with the most contaminated world views and eventually creating a world that could be a ticking time bomb.  

Our silence could be suicidal! 

  

Sequel to 'Drop your Guards'

Through her re ignition into Vipassanna meditation, she definitely was awakened to the fact that if there is pain or suffering in life, the cause of experiencing the misery was all within. Was difficult for her to come to terms with this as an acceptable realization, but arrive she did!

It is the giving in to the sensation that perceives the pain that creates the chain reaction of aversion or craving that entangles us into a perennial cycle of pain and ephemeral pleasure. But the act of pure observation enables a being to float upwards in water just as effortlessly as when he loses his life than when he is feverishly trying to save himself with his arms and legs flailing about...

More than anybody else

It is oneself,

one is to keep the guards intact against

with the undesired waiting to jump on,

And the coveted forever evading.

The first phase of life

The cause for pain was outside…

Completely out there.

Time passed on and

brought the cause closer…

at least half, within oneself.

Now as the lights were turned on,

breaking one open from the cocoon of sleep,

brought the cause completely within.

For the guards inside, when vigilant  

knew, the moment the thieves enter

and no way can the the elements sustain

when the housekeeper is ready

to take them on.

He cannot afford to doze off now...

the remnants of the drowsiness

Keep trying to overpower

That’s where the sleep is

to be rubbed off the eyes.

Life:the play of light and shadow

What an eventful day that was! Out on a holiday, we were my brother's family of four, my parents and me with my two daughters. In all we were nine people.The beach named Alibagh on our way back to his house in Mumbai was the milestone that was to be explored in a couple of hours before reaching home. It did not look as picture perfect as one is wont to expect from the idea of a beach. The sands looked a little unwelcoming, almost as if resentful of having to host a group of enthusiastic tourists. Or I was perhaps made to come back with this impression due to the conspiracy they were going to be a part of, against us: the elements of nature to which the sands could not have been a subdued spectator! Or so i assume!

That vast expanse of that sea stretching far into the horizon spreading and fusing into the distant sky's edge, fading out from the capacity of the normal human vision. It never fails to inspire awe in me but for that ruthless erasing by means of the familiar curiosity with a stale bit of knowledge, of the Earth being a round ball! So that edge is the last visible part of the receding round structure that creates that amazing semblance of the charitable flat surface!

Having left out footwear in the car behind, we were on to wading in the very stretched out shallow beach to the fort stationed upon an island just about five hundred meters away. There were very few souls around on that secluded beach which though was sprinkled with the local flavor of the adjacent populated areas, yet had an unusual sparse presence of people. One lonely hoardings around the beach had something written in Marathi language, thus leaving us ignorant of whatever significant or not so, put up there for the perusal of the passing by population. I only faintly recall that their was perhaps an old style horse buggi type of a ride available on the beach, along with almost a very small number of local folks visible.

Registering all that cursorily we were excitedly on our mission to be heading to our cute palace of a fort lodged fascinatingly upon that island surrounded with water, yet all so shallow that we managed to reach it within roughly fifteen minutes. It must have been an interesting walk while our feet were lodging and scavenger like finding a safe enough foothold upon the invisible surface beneath. There were some nasty surprises awaiting as my mother suddenly happened to step upon something razor sharp, that slashed her right toe ruthlessly inviting a sloshy and angry outburst of blood expressing its disapproval aggressively at that reception! It seemed inconsolably persistent in its complaint!! We were pained to see mum in that state. Having managed to tie her wound with a handkerchief that Papa was carrying , we moved upon the topmost part of the fort.They were evidently dilapidated remains of a palace of a once upon a time flourishing king perhaps. Who knows? We were more keen on sitting down with our huge tiffin and on satisfying our starving stomachs while enjoying the feel of dining at a place as exotic as that!

While we had just about been only half way through our food, I heard this strange unfamiliar siren like sound coming from the beach from where we had started. To my brother it rung a familiar bell! He categorically demanded that we pack up asap and start moving back as the sea was announced to now going to revive its tide ! Meaning it was going to be on a high tide, and not the shallow depth with which we had initially interacted. I now saw how the unusual extended stretch of the beach had a strangeness to it unfamiliar. We packed up in five minutes and began our walk back to the beach. Mum's foot was in bad pain and nevertheless she had to somehow manage.Careful to walk slow to prevent our feet from meeting similar unwelcome lancinating rocky pieces who seemed to be inhabiting that area in hideous numbers, we may have lost some precious time! Or so we realized, when within just about less then half the distance accomplished we were already more than knee deep in the water! The levels were rising!! We had to make it fast! But in the anxiety that was mounting with every advancing step, we were taking the distance that seemed shorter to the beach but as it turned out was deeper and now we were waist length immersed in those threateningly rising waters!

My brother had his five year old daughter by now safely lodged upon his shoulders astride. And my brave bhabhi had the twin son sitting on the same safty zone. My two daughters were holding my hands walking on either side almost on the verge of tears.My parents were holding on to one another by now with utterances as if of the final moments of our lives, for now the water was reaching our chest level!! Mom being the shortest and my younger one the same height that time were the deepest in the menacing waters! We didn't know what to do! We could not have helped ourselves from contemplating the state of my husband being informed about our loss like this! That too after a considerable gap of time, for who would have informed him where we had disappeared!

It was sure that we could not have sustained another 5 mins in that vertical daring momentum that the waters had challenged us with and made us haplessly hoping for mercy from quarters unknown! the fear in our hearts was mounting up.The conflict between the fact of what we were facing and wonder cropping from the deep seated sense that nothing was going to be lost and we were going to make it, was strong. I could see a strange revival of deep love that I had rarely seen between my ever bickering parents. A sense of loss for my husband, impending.

 The distance was still an intimidating one and impossible now for our petty feet that were creating craters wherever they placed themselves! People on the beach who had swelled up slightly in number were standing and watching us aghast at the plight we were reduced to wading between life and death. Having been reduced to a spectacular parade in front of them, they had now  begun shouting and screaming to pep us up and to speed up, only if there were the possibility!

Herein appeared the horse buggy wala with one more person to assist him suddenly rushing to our rescue! Were we going to heave a sigh of relief? Mumma and the kids were made to climb followed by Papa, me and bhabhi and then my bro! But Lo! The bugghi went deeper into the sands refusing to budge! For once we were blank but the next instant jumped my bhai, his wife and I who could not have remained inside in spite of their appeals. The wheels lifted out of the stuck sandy bed, and courageously pushed strong enough, to enable the light of the day finally beaming upon the faces of us all, out of those ravenous waters!! Or rather out of those kind waters who were just having some innocent fun toying with the little playthings?

Did we actually make it!! Were we actually so completely alive this moment, unlike the moment before when we were so thoroughly surrendered to our fate mocking at our petty efforts!! What a play of light and shadow by the naughty clouds was the taste of that slice of life, the memory of which still relives with the excitement of visiting the mysterious! The same moment could have meant annihilation...and here we were alive and ticking...strange feeling ...confounding explanation!

that room of mine has so many stories....

A room of my own is perhaps a gift, the value of which I didn't realize till I talked to a recent and a very accomplished friend of mine who told me that she did not have the luxury of her own space during her formative childhood years. Just  like we  undermine so many other things that we take for granted that we are awarded without ourselves making any effort.

Oh how I felt an empathetic gush of emotion towards her when she divulged this fact, for the closeness that I feel with her. She belongs to another full fledged space for herself. Coming to the recollected vision of my favorite space, my room: the first memory that comes to me is that of the vast open sky over the terrace space that led to my very own small yet large enough territory. The sky space was also available through a window as large as a door posted in my room. It was securely partially grilled for preventive measures while allowing the upper part thoroughly free to connect to the open area outside. I remember standing there more often than not drinking from the city scape scenes outside. There were sights and sounds that greeted innocent visions now and then popping up sensational surprises. The most entertaining of the scenes were enacted by the dramatis personae I'd like you to make an attempt to guess.

Without unnecessary delay I must whisper in your ears that they were none other than troops of monkeys that harmoniously co existed with the humans in those traditional residential areas adjacent to the locally flavored bazaars. Oh what antics they would award us with every now and then! And for all the harmony that coexisted between the two species, there were only these very frequent visitations by their shrewdly demanding blackmailing  herds. All that they would very politely do was just to snatch away the clothes that would gullibly be drying up upon the unsuspecting clotheslines! And if the poor owners weren't buoyant and quick witted enough, before they would realize the clothes would be meeting a terribly mournful fate of being turned to tatters within as much as the blink of an eye! The simians would generally nevertheless end up being rewarded  with rotis or any thing for that matter temptingly edible that the owners could fish out as instantly as possible! And Lo! The clothes would mostly be parted with and dropped back while you would be looking on with utmost hope flickering through its last remnants towards any life still remaining in that outfit!!

On one instance I recall my mother bravely snatching back a very expensive shirt of my father that would otherwise have met with the same ruinous misfortune! It was about to be dying a premature death at the hands of a ravenous female monkey who knew howto get her job done. The joy of that victory is still potent enough to bring back a smile of a puffed up chest at the recollection of a warrior mom!!

One more very hilarious event that I was lucky enough to be an inadvertent spectator to was when i saw a child of about 11 or 12 years mishandled rather unceremoniously by a senior patriarch of the clan. I was just as usual ruminatively posted over the huge and expansive window of my very own room, when all of a sudden i accost this very unusual spectacle! He, the graybeard must as I assume now, had been ill treated by his wife, or perhaps his boss, oh who know's what..was definitely in a bad mental demeanor. Thus he naturally found his frustration venting itself out upon this boy so strangely! All that the poor ape did was catch hold of the boy's hair with both his hands while shaking his head to his utmost oscillatory capacity before he decided to spare him. I could almost pinch myself back to senses, or wildly rub my eyes to believe what i had just seen. It was not the normal way the aggression of monkeys was known to have expressed itself. There were serious monkey bite instances often heard. But this was a mild treat in comparison. The little boy must have been as zapped as i was just viewing the scene from my far off window!

There are numerous memories that are tumbling unstoppable as I have taken a willful dive into that lovely past, that are endearingly related to that loving, cozy, pampering, motherly room of mine. So I cannot help but promise to come back with many more sensational one's that are waiting to take off from the precipice of those nostalgic branches.

Wistfully Yours,
Bhoomika