Chitra Gopalakrishnan
January 29, 2009

TO FACE THE BATS, THE OWLS AND THE INSANE MOON*

Form
This winter break was when I discovered cooking; not the pasta-pizza dorm survival type that I’ve always done, but the more labor intensive, freshly ground, blended, mixed and time-consuming type. I had long conversations with my grandma (where she’d tell me about her tricks with Indian cooking) and then to feel smarter about it, I would look up recipes online. What I then realized was that you can be as prepared as you want to be, but when you’re looking at the pan heating up the oil in it, there’s no room for contemplation. Its an instinctive dance, a leap of faith, a rush of energy to keep up with the speed of the moment. If I missed that precise time for the cumin to be added or forgot the tiny bit of sugar that balanced the tamarind or over steamed the lentils, I might as well start all over again.

Here is how a video is like all what I just described:
• Its intensely hinged on a sense of timing.
• The dosage of each element is critical to its experience.
• It plays on your senses in a direct, uninhibited way.
• A successful one is effortless and natural in appearance.

Analogies apart, my reasons for making this work were to further some of the themes I’ve been working on previously. After reviews and thinking over my approach to making work, I realized that I had many layers in my work, which functioned well on their own, but failed to interact with one another to create some tension in the work. Also, with my drawings, I saw them as sketches that built scenarios on theories that interested me. With this video, I am hoping to initiate that process, where various layers of digitally generated content, video footage and sonorous elements converse with each other to generate a dialogue. Does it taste good, yet?

Content
Picture this: you’re walking in a park and you reach a dense cluster of trees. You look up and the trees seem to envelop you, protectively shading you with their branches. You’re feeling comfortable and slowly close your eyes in the gentle embrace. All of a sudden, the branches protecting you seem to tighten and you feel an overwhelming sense of panic. You loose the trust in your surroundings, you start to hear strange noises and your brain almost starts to disintegrate with the weight of that fear. You’re fighting back and nothing seems to work. And then something you do makes you open your eyes. You have walked out into the sun once again; things are silent, calm and peaceful now. What is weird is that they were so already to start with and you cant seem to place why that momentary loss of reason and perception occurred.

This might seem like a naïve scenario; but what interests me in this is an acknowledgement of the fear. The fact that you would stop to wonder what happened, instead of fleeing the scene and labeling that park a haunted place. Traditionally used as a hunting technique, mass panic is a favourite of not just sociologists but is also an old political strategy. (Naomi Klein in the Shock Doctrine does a great job of discussing it, so does Jackie Orr in Panic Diaries). Everything from military planning to corporate strategy to even the design of the Mecca is hinged upon collective behavioral patterns.

Whether its a war waiting to happen or its that new kid in class, knowing which one of our various fears is real may just be a better way to brace oneself to face it even. A reaction to panic based solely on our fear of the unknown, may be the fine defining line between deciding whether one is the frightened herd animal that jumps off a cliff or the evolved creature that determines what is worth fleeing from.

* Taken from Amartya Sen’s essay “The Reach of Reason”