Some food for thought

Ali Fazal

Do you think God gets stoned? I think so…look at the platypus." Not many can forget this quote by Robin Williams. There have been enough articles about him, so I won't go into his body of work. I practically grew up on Mork & Mindy and Mrs. Doubtfire. But hey, they all have to go, and so they do. I bet he's already started a comic club up there or wherever the Gods float. The best comedies sadly come from our own 11 o'clock tragedies; we love to laugh at the obnoxious and the humiliating. With a tinge of comic timing, a clumsy fat man rolling down the steps makes for a great scene. In a darker avatar, that scene would result in the person's death and in the Quentin Tarantino version that head would splatter in five different ways before the scene ended.

Coming back to what I am getting at: as an actor or an artist, are we just a summation of various ideas and visuals? How would Mr. XYZ cry at a friend's funeral and how would that be different from the way he cries when his mother or father passes away? Is the twitch below the jaw or in the neck the same? Or are we contorting our faces to fit a certain expression? Or am I intellectualising this way out of proportion? To put it simply, I am trying to say that we do not possess anything of our own today; it's all trickled down to us. Every decision, every choice. We are mere enablers and movers. We move one thought from A to B, that's it.

So let's try this - I will tell you to not think of a rat right now. You did picture a rat, didn't you? Our uniqueness lies in the way we place these thoughts; there's a sense of borrowed thought but it's original placement that makes it our own. To be honest, this entire passage dwells on an idea I borrowed from one of my conversations with Mahesh Bhatt. In essence, we have all said something right now under my name. I almost feel like saying it's the damn matrix and we are all connected but better judges are out there.

Ali Fazal is an actor, known for his performances in 3 Idiots, Fukrey and recently, Bobby Jasoos.