Prenom: Carmen/Jean-Luc Godard

This is a blog recording my desperate attempts of touching screens through written words, which are seldom perfect vehicle of feelings.

If you find Bengali/Indian proper names as addressees of many posts, they are young and curious minds with whom I attempt to, five days a week, ponder on screens via spoken words, many a time an appropriate index of…feelings as ideas.

Ritwik Ghatak’s Komal Gandhar

Well, the last post quoting Chief Seattle’s speech triggered memories of my MA dissertation on Ritwik Kumar Ghatak’s films. Since writer’s block continues, here is a revised section on one of this great Bengali filmmaker’s autobiographical works. The connection with the earlier post might be evident. The following has been published earlier…elsewhere.

Ritwik Kumar Ghatak (1925-1976)

The West: End of Living and the Beginning of Survival

Sorry folks, this prolonged and unending writer’s block is really turning out to be a pain in the posterior. Dhriti requested me yesterday to write about my impressions on John Ford’s Cheyenne Autumn (1964). Now here is a damaging reply to that: I intend to write a series of posts on the plethora of westerns I immersed myself in for the last couple of months. So you get it, a man suffering severe writer’s block promising a series of 30 or so posts!

Let me instead present you something poignantly beautiful. This might act as a preamble to our possible discussions on the Westerns. This is excerpted from the famous speech given in the 1850s by Chief Seattle, the famous leader of the Suquamish and Duwamish Native American tribes of Washington, USA in a response to the authorities’ decision to buy Indian lands. Of course the speech is translated and the authenticity of the text is questioned by many.