Tatvam

Here's what -

• Loins love - My take on the hilarious movie Loins Of Punjab Presents
• Fastasmagoric Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. He rocks. The Lives Of Others is the best film I have seen in years!
• A pithy (very pithy - we like pithy) piece on what the audience knows.
• And yes, you can get expelled for making a gay film with partial nudity. So what if it is 2007??

Happy long weekend y'all!

I've been getting slightly better with writing on my Tatvam blog and I promise that things will only get better. Really! I already have a ton of posts in my head. With that said here's what's recently been on Tatvam:

• Acting for directors: my first, formal, acting class - what I learned and the crazy things I did
• Like no other: Sony Bravia's fabulous advertisement shot on the streets of San Francisco and what went into it
• Final cut tussels: Why directors and producers fight over "final cut" rights
• In honor of Scorsese: Written in early March, thoughts on a brilliant review in the New York Times of the most un-Scorsese of Scorsese’s movies, Age of Innocence

I hope you enjoy them and I look forward to your thoughts!

I've been neglecting my Tatvam blog for a little bit. But I'm back to posting there. Here's what's on Tatvam:

• A perspective on The Hand - Wang Kar Wai's visually fabulous movie
• How I jam out a First Draft of a screenplay
• An interesting video of graphic artists gone wild and super-creative
• And finally, some good news about Fair Use and documentary film

The last post is about how the clarification of Fair Use is helping documentary filmmakers. I am very interested in how culture evolves, how technology and art are inspired, and how prevailing laws enable or choke that innovation. I read Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture when it came out and was fascinated with the history of innovation and his hypotheses on where we were headed. Am also a huge proponent of freeing up usage laws so people can invent, innovate and change how we see things. Both my blogs use a Creative Commons license (heh - amazing that I would need that with just imaginary readers and all...). With Share Alike, you can allow people to morph your work, if they allow others the same rights to their work -- that is a virtuous cycle. But even with Share Alike, you can also preserve your rights through Required Attribution and Non-Commercial use, if you so desire (and I so desire, so this license gives you all three of those elements).

My whole life, I've worked in structured environments. If anything, the first school I went to, The School KFI, from kindergarten to 7th grade was the most unstructured. We had an amazing campus and often classes were held under the trees - including the banyan tree in this post. Kids were free to wander around and commune with nature if they wished (meaning you could get up and leave a class with no explanation!) and every day, we had an hour of PT to finish the day. There were also no exams and no concept of real competition - if you ran a race and won, you were told everyone was a winner and there were no prizes. It was awesome. One of the best schools for a child. But then my parents realized this was not preparing me for the real world and moved me to a much more academically rigorous school, one that embraced competition, meant to prepare me for India's grueling national exams (in the 10th and 12th grades). Then, I went off to college, where there was more structure, then to work at a manufacturing company, then to graduate school (where we even had assigned seating in the first year!). Since graduating, I've been employed every minute. Until now. At work, in pretty much every job I've had, meetings and deliverables ruled how I spent my day. But now, I have nothing... No structure. No deliverables. No deadlines. To get stuff done, I need to create my own structure. I need to figure out a way to ensure I am moving my writing and my other creative projects forward. It is too easy to spend the day on chores, surfing the web and classes. Any ideas?

Sorry I haven't been posting here. I've been jammed with the film festival. I have been writing about it on Tatvam. Back really soon.

Today, Tatvam Productions was born online. Tatvam means reality or inner truth in Sanskrit. Tatvam Productions tells stories that reach for the truth, share the reality and communicate the inner meaning. Tatvam will be my professional blog where I blog about the entertainment world. This blog will continue to host my random musings. Getting Tatvam live was a team effort.

• The name Tatvam was conceived by my Grandmother (the tech savvy one) and my Mother.
• The cool logo was created by Kathleen Ko and I got lots of input on which one to choose from my husband, brother and sister.
• The completely, fabulously, mind-blowingly cool site was designed by George Liang.

And all in record time. May Tatvam be with you!