Cinema is hands down the biggest influence on us. That colossal screen that homes in wonder has been toying with our lives ever since we were kids. Something created merely to keep us in line, keep us from drifting away. Every thought, every action of ours, drenched with a heroic mindset, as if we were the protagonists of our own story. If we didn’t feel love, we felt it because the big bad-ass screen told us to. If we didn’t know what to do, the talking wall taught us what to pick. If we didn’t know where to go, the story in the wall pointed us towards. Our lives smeared by its boisterous presence. It is like a religion that keeps us in check inadvertently.
No one on this wretched planet of ours has a clue about one’s destiny. No one knows what needs to be done. What is life’s ultimate goal apart from crumbling down to nothingness? Who told us to build? Who told us to live? Who told us to do anything? What if I decide to slay a day by doing nothing? Would it change anything? Who is to judge? Who is to say that I wasted it? But you never told us what to do! How can it be called futile? If living is the only thing that matters, didn’t I just live?
But that gigantic thingy guides you to the right grooves. Pushes you into professions and things that you didn’t have a clue about. Suddenly the clueless you, jumps off your seat to pursue a life that the screen aggrandized. Out of the blue you have a purpose. And lo! You are caught in a wretched pointless living cycle once again, following a thing you do not know, that sieved its way into your head all because a screen, that must be true and a story that you could relate to, fed you.
Cinema has the power to project the living in a flamboyant way. It has the power to exalt the trodden too. It can depict future, can let you live the past, can focus on the uplifted, or make you empathize with the destitute. It could be a mere projection of one’s imagination, of the societal happenings, of fantasies from a child’s head, of the dark life, of the heroic of the norm, of fears unexplored, of places unattended, of the truth, of the lies or could be a product of someone’s big plan to keep us engaged, keep us from thinking the unthinkable, to keep us brooding, to keep our brains in check with lives of others, so that we forget ours!
