Sunday, May 08, 2011

The Roads of Pune



I know this blog is about words. And so the tagline screams. But lately, I have been writing something apart from the blog and I am a little skeptical of touching anything that will change my style and tone. The work is back breaking, mind numbing, and time consuming. It is liberating.


To help the mind relax, I thought I would teach myself to draw on the computer. Nothing comes close to drawing in the list of the many things that I cannot do. My fear of heights is perhaps matched by my fear of being asked by Gabbar to draw to keep Dharmendar alive.


"Draw GP draw. Jab tak tere parabola banege, tab tak dharmendar will be alive"


" Let him die, let him die. In a few years he will give us Bobby Deol" I want to scream back.


If you tell me to draw a 'point' i will still manage to mess that up. That's how bad I am. I am the type whose favorite drawing is a sun setting between two mountains and a flock of birds flying across the Sun. ( The trick is to just draw a tick mark for every bird). But by the time I am through the Sun looks like a mountain and the bird looks like perfume bottle. The mountain looks like Bobby Deol.


But i force myself on. After drawing for a while ( eleven seconds)  I naturally had to try animating! My favorite movie form is animation - and one long term dream is to make an animated movie or start writing a comic strip. And so last Sunday, when I was absolutely sick of the written word - I tried to make a small animation.


If I thought writing was difficult, ouch. Animation turned out to be a Waqar yorker bowled by an innocuous looking Joginder Sharma. Hours and hours of sketching, taking pictures, using photoshop, selecting the right sound , using a toy car, using a crappy movie maker on an old power thirsty laptop later - I come up with this. A 15 second film which is really shoddy work. Ah, but I love it. It is me losing my drawinity.


They say a picture is worth a thousand words. The time required to draw this picture..hmmm... I am not sure. But it is mine. And I love every single frame of it. I hope you do.


It also has a social message somewhere. Stop allowing these morons to make killer speed breakers on Pune roads. Every day, one would hear the squeal of tyres followed by a thud on the speed breaker that has been made or rather dumped on the road in front of my house. People are dying, and there is no humor in this. Our country can send rockets to space but cannot make speed breakers.


On the other hand are the drivers in Pune. I dont know what the big hurry is,  but everyone in Pune has a meeting to go to. Slow down people. The Shaniwarwada is not going anywhere.


Here you go - enjoy what I will aptly call - The Road to Perdition / My First Non Mountain drawing / Surviving Pune / Learning Rally Car Driving.






1 comment:

Unknown said...

At first,just like the road signs on pune roads, I couldn't see the video...blame it on my slow connection. As always, the writing is enjoyable. Losing my drawinity bit was funny :-)
I know what u r talking about as I am one of the morons driving on pune roads all the while singing..bachana ai haseeno...!
good effort at animation..way to go!

btw "Absinthe" that u posted on BB today was very well written. amzing how you create poems around a single word or object. Makes me look up the dictionary often ;-)