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A classroom discussion today became almost cathartic, recall as it did some real-life blues. In an impressively perceptive essay, literary critic Christian Bok talks of the aestheticisation of violence in Michael Ondaatje's works. There is a conflict in Ondaatje, he says, between the withdrawal of the writer from society on the one hand and his social commitment on the other.
The argument made me turn to the glorification of violence in films, all the more pernicious for their immediate and overwhelming impact. You step out of the theatre after three hours of 'Three Idiots'. Your friend is visibly relieved the film is over -- the delivery scene nearly made her puke. Another friend is all praise for the film and the sound drubbing it issued to a competition-driven academia. You thought it was good in parts, but could have surely spared you some nauseating melodrama.
Twenty days later... what do you retain? The criticism, the 'message', the breathtaking shots of Shimla or a scene where students are lined up to submit to a most humiliating form of punishment that passes off as ragging? Add to the list recurrent motifs of literal pant-pulling and a funky brainer about putting the properties of salt water to good use. Remember Fungsuk Wangdu's school? This time around, it is children who display their precocious knowledge that salt water is a good conductor of electricity. But hey, wasn't this supposed to be a teach-those-cruel-seniors-a-lesson stunt? Those who have read Golding's Lord of the Flies would notice a similarity with Roger aiming a stone at the littluns.
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