kryptography

Appacha

Sat, 19 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

When I was 7, my grandfather was the tallest person in the world. He towered over the rest of the family when we gathered in the evening to pray; the patriarch of the house, starting every prayer as we followed along and setting the tempo as we sang. However, when my brother started shooting up as well, I started to realize that I was mistaken. Having friends who were so tall, my neck hurt to look at their faces further drove home the realization. It never hurt to look at Appacha. His face was stern when he wasn’t doing anything but he still radiated kindness. Shy toddlers who hid behind their mothers when approached by any of us would happily swing their feet next to Appacha, and he would engage with them with equal vigour. He was a man who was universally liked, a man without a selfish bone in his body, who had never said an unkind word about anyone in all the years I had known him.

To the imagination of a child, Appacha was something like a gentle giant. His movements were slow and purposeful, and whenever he did stir, his actions were significant undertakings that enthralled my childish senses. Take, for instance, ironing day, when he would spread a large thick sheet over the dining table and iron sarees and shirts and mundus and make me stand at the other end of the living room holding one end of the warm saree as he folded it methodically. Or the time he used potassium permanganate to clean the well and my brother and I lost ourselves in the deep purple crystals. Or when he and my grandmother would spend an entire afternoon baking cakes (regular and an eggless cake made specially for me, the queen of allergies) for us to take back with us to Bahrain. He was meticulous to a fault; he would carefully spread a newspaper in the storeroom and sift the baking powder and flour together for what seemed to me like an eternity. Surely it didn’t matter that much? This impatience is probably why I can never be a good baker. I am not sure who inherited Appacha’s endless reservoir of patience in our family, perhaps it is something that life beats into you. He was diplomatic in all regards; unlike my grandmother, he never took sides when my brother and I fought. He never raised his voice against the man who mistreated his only daughter for years either. My mother says this is a symptom of a weak personality, to always see the good in people despite their actions. Did Jesus have a weak personality too?

Most of my memories of summer vacations in Kottarakara swirl around his figure, sometimes seated in his favorite cane chair solving a sudoku, other times returning from an evening walk in a spotless white mundu. He is omnipresent in this house - I cannot look at a doorway or a corner or a spot in the garden and not see him standing there in a polo t-shirt and a kaili folded at the knee. He used to stand on the steps to the porch and greet us when we came to visit. Later on, as his mobility decreased, he would sit in the giant rosewood chair by the door. The last few times we came to see him, he was seated on his bed, hunched over. But despite where he was or how bad his health was, his cloudy grey eyes would light up when we walked through the door, and his mouth would curve upwards, revealing a happy grin that warmed every corner of my body. When we were still in school and holiday homework was still a thing, he would make the arduous climb up the stairs just to call us down for lunch. He would go through magazines in the evening to prepare bedtime stories to tell me at night that I could never remember the next morning. There are very few things I am certain of in this world and one of them is that Appacha loved his grandchildren. I cannot fathom the endless summer of childhood spent without knowing unconditional love like that. I don’t think I would be the same person I am today if I never knew it.

He had a bookshelf full of Malayalam encyclopedias, classic Russian literature and American noir novels and yet I never saw him read anything other than the newspaper. He had pithy sayings he would let out during conversations, but the most enduring one was him telling us to always keep things in their right place. His skin was extraordinarily soft but his toenails grossed me out. When I ruffled his hair, it stood up white and fluffy and I would laugh and call him Albert Einstein. I used to love it when he took his dentures out and his chuckles turned toothless, like a newborn baby. He still carried scars from a road accident he had gotten into when he was about to enter university. He once told me a story of how his town had gotten flooded and he had to swim home but the details and truth of the incident escape me now. He loved sweets - my grandmother would make sarcastic remarks about how he would probably dip his halwa in honey - but he somehow never faced problems with his blood sugar. Some things can better be explained as blessings.

I come from a family of teachers. My mother trained to be a Physics teacher - the fact that she didn’t is a different matter altogether. My paternal grandfather was a school headmaster. My maternal grandmother was a professor of Botany in a nearby college. And Appacha was a teacher of teachers. He was a professor in a B.Ed. college, a place people went to become teachers, so I obviously thought he was the smartest of the lot. My precocious nature ensured that the relentless passage of time caused me a great of anxiety from a very young age, and so teaching never had much appeal to me. I hated the thought of being stuck in the same place as my students crossed the threshold of my classroom to reach heights in the world I would never see. But seeing my grandparents’ old students devotedly come to visit them with news and gifts and wedding invitations, an assembly of old friends who thought the world of you, who shared your youth with you and made sure you weren’t forgotten - perhaps it wasn’t so bad after all?

Even as Appacha’s body grew weak with age, he worked hard to keep his mind young. He religiously solved the sudoku from The Hindu every day, he taught me to play checkers and unlike my grandmother, was always amenable to learning new technology. When I was still a child who hadn’t been disillusioned by the realities of how my family worked, I had birthdays where I would wake up to my family softly singing “Happy birthday” around me while presents that had been hidden in my parents’ bedroom for weeks would lie scattered on my bed. Christmases carried a similar magic, with sparkly presents appearing under the decked-up tree. Yet, equally exciting as the presents was a little gift I would receive in my inbox - an animated greeting card from 123greetings.com carefully selected and sent from my grandfather’s email. I didn’t spend September or December in India but my grandfather still managed to be a part of those rosy echoes of childhood.

There are people who are so intertwined with your childhood memories that their death feels like the death of your childhood. I was lying next to Appacha one night when I felt the pangs of puberty materialize as two bony mounds under my chest. My mother tells me I got scared and asked him what it was but I no longer remember that. It frightens me that I can’t remember words and names and faces as well as everyone else. Sometimes, life feels like a dream that is slipping through the sieve of my memory. I try and try to hold on but it feels like trapping air with my bare hands. So I write. To capture the sensation for a bit longer. To remember how it felt to hold Appacha’s smooth hand and squeeze it and feel my hand get squeezed back with his old strength even as he lay helpless in bed. To etch into my brain the weight of his body as I pushed him up so he could drink water without choking in his final few days. To keep in my heart the last time I ever gave him a kiss goodnight before he left this world for a happier place.

At 5 AM on 15th July 2025, I watched them measure Appacha from head to toe for his coffin with a piece of black thread. They gave me the thread for safe-keeping. My grandfather, once the tallest person in the world, now fit in the space between my closed fist and my beating heart.

Kant's True Vocation Of Reason

Fri, 05 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

“The true vocation of reason must be to produce a will that is good, not perhaps as a means to other purposes, but good in itself, for which reason was absolutely necessary.”

— Immanuel Kant, ‘The Good Will’ in Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals

In the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Immanuel Kant elaborates on his theories of deontological ethics revolving around a sense of duty and some universal moral principles. His primary focus is on how the only thing good in the world is a good will. Talents of the mind like courage and understanding are good and desirable but can be extremely harmful if the will which makes use of these talents is corrupt. Likewise, gifts of fortune like honour and happiness are beneficial for a person only if a good will exists which can correct the influence of these on the mind. Good will, however, is good in itself and remains good even if it is deprived of other capacities.

Kant believes that rational beings like humans are endowed with reason, and this reason helps them follow their moral duty and act towards moral law. The moral laws are represented as categorical imperatives, wherein these laws must always be followed, irrespective of the situation or consequences. The moral demands brought about by a good will are rational compulsions and help make a person truly ‘good’.

Kant starts his argument on shaky ground by assuming that everything nature gives humans is for a reason. He seeks to find inherent meaning and value in life and nature, despite the failure of mankind to find purpose or rationality in the universe. He says that people with a more cultivated reason tend to be unhappier. They purposely engage themselves with the enjoyment of life and happiness and hence are led further away from what Kant believes is true satisfaction. They are left with something if a hatred towards reason and begin to envy the common man, whose decisions and behaviour are guided more by the baser instincts than by reason, and who, as a result, is happier. By this logic, an animal with no way to reason is always going to be happier than any human with an ounce of reasoning capabilities.

The last issue with the argument is the binary assignment of purposes to reason. If reason is not responsible for happiness and self-preservation, why must it automatically be responsible for a higher purpose of generating a pure good will in rational beings? Kant fails to take into account that there must be other valid purposes for reason to exist, and it could also simply be a supplement to the welfare of a being, rather than a sole causator.

This analysis doesn’t take into account the other obvious flaws with his theory of ‘good will’, like what happens if two universal laws come into conflict with one another (such as keeping promises and helping someone out) or if there is any net good that comes out of actions directed solely by good will.

India as a Linguistic Area

Sun, 26 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

A linguistic area refers to a geographical area in which, due to borrowing and language contact, languages of a region come to share certain structural or lexical features as a result of their close proximity. The elements shared by these languages are called areal features, and are acquired rather than inherited. Languages are generally classified typologically or genetically; the genetic classification of languages points to the existence of language families, wherein languages can be grouped based on their shared inheritance from a common ancestor. However, a linguistic area is a result of the diffusion of linguistic traits over genetic boundaries so that genetically dissimilar languages or dialects can be grouped together due to common features that they have acquired as a result of contact.

According to a recent census, India has about 121 languages belonging to four major language families:

Indo-Aryan – Marathi, Bangla, Hindi etc.
Dravidian – Telugu, Tamil etc.
Austro-Asiatic – Mundari, Santhali etc.
Tibeto-Burman – Meitei (spoken in Manipur), Gongduk etc.

Each of these families have a few defining features, for instance, Indo-Aryan languages utilize aspirated consonants while Dravidian languages don’t. Austro-Asiatic languages use glottal stops and circumfixation, and Tibeto-Burman languages are highly tonal.

These four language families in India have influenced each other over the course of almost 3000 years through political and social contact. Over time, their coexistence has given rise to an underlying pan-Indian linguistic pattern that can be attributed to the Indian Linguistic Area. Linguistic and racial purity is a myth today - the mixing of population through invasions, inter-marriages, trade and migration led to the diffusion of languages in each other. In the olden times, travelers and merchants from all over the subcontinent would interact with others in marketplaces, royal courts, and caravanserais. People speaking different dialects and languages could be found working in the same factory or farm. On the battlefield, soldiers would speak indigenous languages while their superiors would speak different ones. Every major movement of people would result in the movement of their language too; as sultanates, kingdoms and administrations expanded their territories or shifted their capitals, a linguistic assimilation was inevitable. In fact, there is proof of the intermixing of Dravidian and Indo-Aryan languages through the pockets of Dravidian-based languages like Brahui and Kurukh in remote areas of Pakistan and interspersed areas of North India.

Murray B. Emeneau, a prominent American linguist wrote a seminal article called ‘India as a Linguistic Area’ where he defined a linguistic area as ‘an area which includes languages belonging to more than one family but showing traits in common’. In the paper, Emeneau observed that the subcontinent’s Dravidian and Indo-Aryan languages shared a number of areal features including retroflex consonants, echo words, subject–object–verb word order, discourse markers, and the quotative, which came about as the result of extensive borrowing and diffusion. He noted that ‘the end result of the borrowings is that the languages of the two families, Indo-Aryan and Dravidian, seem in many respects more akin to one another than Indo-Aryan does to the other Indo-European languages’. Over centuries, the four language families had converged structurally, such that the languages became similar at an abstractive level, but still maintained their identity with their lexicon.

For instance, in the border village of Kupwar, people speak 3 languages: Kannada, Urdu and Marathi (of which the former is Dravidian and the other two are Indo-Aryan). Most individuals are trilingual in the area, and constantly switch back and forth among these languages. Over time, the varieties have grammatically converged, with the 3 varieties having almost the same word order and morphology, while maintaining a distinct vocabulary.

Structural and Lexical Similarities

The most common way that languages influence each other is the exchange of words. The exchange is not unidirectional and Sanskrit (Indo-Aryan) words are often found in languages belonging to other languages families of India, and vice versa.

Sanskrit words in Malayalam like sneham (സ്നേഹം) from sneh (स्नेह) and ahaṅkāram (അഹങ്കാരം) from ahaṅkār (अहङ्कारः)
The Tamil word ulagu (உலகு) became log (लोग्) in Sanskrit, logamu in Telugu and lok in Hindi.

Within the same language family, vocabulary is often similar. For instance, ‘name’ is written as pēru in Telugu, pēr in Malayalam and peyar in Tamil.

Similarly, several phonetic traits are common to Indian languages, like the hard retroflex ‘t-’ from tamatar (टमाटर), or voiceless aspirated sounds like ‘kh-’ and ‘ph-’, from khana (खाना) and phool (फूल). These sounds are so widespread that they are even found in isolated languages like Andamanese.

The influence goes deeper than this, and features related to the morphology and grammar of these language families are exchanged. For instance, Nepal Bhasa (Newar) is a Sino-Tibetan language distantly related to Chinese but owing to its contact with neighbouring Indo-Iranian languages, has developed traits like noun inflection and verb tenses that are typical of Indo-European languages, but rare in Sino-Tibetan.

People dancing at the Nagaland Hornbill Festival

Irrespective of family, most Indian languages follow a Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) typological structure. Consider the sentence “The boy throws the ball”.

Malayalam: kuṭṭi pant eṟiyunnu (കുട്ടി പന്ത് എറിയുന്നു)
Hindi: ladaka gend phenkata hai (लड़का गेंद फेंकता है)
Nepali: kēṭālē bala phyālcha (केटाले बल फ्याल्छ)

Here, the subject (the boy / kuṭṭi) is followed by the object (the ball / pant) and ends with the verb (throws / eṟiyunnu). However, this is not always the case. Tibeto-Burman languages like Karenic and Baic have SVO (subject–verb–object) word order, like Chinese.

Most Indian languages are also morphologically rich, which means they have a relatively free word order. Unlike the syntax-heavy English, Indian languages allows ‘word chunks’ to move, as the morphological elements carry a lot of grammatical information. Consider the sentence “The girl hit the boy”. If we switch the subject and object, we get “The boy hit the girl”, which doesn’t mean the same. However, in Hindi, the same sentence “ladki ne ladke ko mara” can be rewritten as “ladke ko ladki ne mara” and the meaning would remain the same.

Another common feature is the pro-drop, where redundant pronouns (pleonastic expletives) are not used. The sentence “It is raining” contains the pronoun ‘it’ which is semantically vacuous. In Tamil, the same sentence would be written as maḻai peykiṟatu (மழை பெய்கிறது) without a pronoun.

Additionally, most languages are left-branching (with respect to their parse tree) and use postpositions. In Burmese, the phrase “over the table” translates to hcarr pwal kyaw (စားပွဲကျော်) where kyaw is the preposition.

Reduplication is a feature found in the Indian Linguistic Area. By repeating the base word, we put more emphasis, intensify, imply plurality etc. This can be done on nouns, verbs, adverbs or even adjectives.

Hindi: ghar-ghar means ‘every house’
Tamil: chinna-chinna means ‘little’

In Indian languages, the auxiliary verb follows the main verb. For the sentence “You may go”, the auxiliary ‘may’ is represented in Hindi by ‘sakte’ and in Malayalam by the ending inflection ‘-am’.

Hindi: tum ja sakte ho
Malayalam: ninakk pokām

Furthermore, time adverbials precede place adverbials. Consider Main tumhe kal institute mein milungi. This sentence can be translated to “I will meet you in the institute tomorrow”. While the adverbial chunks can be interchanged, this is the standard order of saying it: kal/’tomorrow’ is said first, and followed by the place ‘institute’. These adverbials are also used in the descending order, In the sentence Mujhe India mein Hyderabad ke IIIT ke gate par milo, the order in which the adverbials occur starts from the largest (‘India’), followed by ‘Hyderabad’, and keeps getting more specific or smaller as the sentence progresses.

The Indian Linguistic Area has many more shared grammatical features, like the usage of the conjunctive participle as a discourse connector, echo words, following a relative clause + noun + postposition order etc. The coexistence of all these language families for centuries while changing each other gradually as a result of their contact is a reminder of the evolutionary nature of language and the social factors that result in its transformation.

References:

India as a Linguistic Area, M. B. Emeneau
Language: Its Structure and Use, Edward Finegan
Tibeto-Burman languages

Languages, Dialects and Social Behaviour

Fri, 24 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

“A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.” ― Max Weinreich

A language is generally understood as a collection of dialects and linguistic varieties. All languages exhibit some form of internal variation, and exist in a number of different varieties. However, when we normally talk about a language, we refer to the variety that is standardized and accepted by society as the ‘proper’ language. Here, the line separating a dialect from a language has always been a bit blurred. A common belief is that a dialect is a ‘local, non-prestigious and powerless variety of a real language’. It is often thought of as a substandard language that is excluded from polite society, and connotes various degrees of inferiority (that is passed on to the speakers of a dialect too).

Linguistically speaking, there is no difference between the accepted variety of a language and its dialects. They are both regular and have rule-governed systems. No single linguistic system can be shown to be inherently better, so the usage of a dialect provides neither an advantage nor a disadvantage. The decision to call a particular variety ‘a language’ depends on the amount of power held by the speakers of that variety over other dialects. A language is afforded more prestige than a dialect, and is set as the ideal to strive towards. Thus, a hierarchy is formed that places the speakers of the standard language above dialect speakers.

Criteria for a Language

A set of criteria can be used to examine if the empowered variety of a language could be more developed than its dialects, and the sociolinguistic attributes that influence social attitudes to either.

Standardization is the sociopolitical process of codifying a language by developing grammars, spelling books, dictionaries etc. leading to the acceptance of a formal set of norms defining “correct usage”. It is a sociopolitical process that involves picking one language variety and deeming it to be socially preferable. Ex: In Kerala, written media in the form of magazines and newspapers originated in the Kottayam district. Till date, the Central Travancore dialect spoken there is regarded as the standard Malayalam.
Vitality refers to the existence of a living community of speakers for that language.
Historicity is the sense of identity that a particular group of people finds through using a particular language.
Autonomy is the feeling that your language is different from another, and the refusal to be regarded as a dialect of a ‘larger’ language. Ex: the Hindi-Urdu disparity.
Reduction happens when a particular variety is regarded as a sub-variety due to the lack of opportunities afforded to its users, or restrictions in its use. Ex: Nagamese Creole (pidgin Assamese) is structurally reduced and cannot represent gender.
Mixture refers to the feelings the speakers have about the ‘purity’ of the variety they speak.
De Facto Norms refers to the feeling that there are ‘good’ and ‘bad’ speakers of a language and the good speakers represent the norms of proper usage.

A Political Difference

We can say two varieties are different from each other because of the disparities in vocabulary, grammatical rules and pronunciation of words. But at what point do they stop being dialects of the same language and turn into two different languages? This question isn’t as straightforward as defining a dialect as the set of mutually intelligible varieties of a language. The decision for something to be called a language or dialect is tied up with how countries identify their boundaries, how many people speak the language and other political considerations. For instance, Hindi and Urdu are essentially the same language, but are considered separate and even have different scripts. Their differences were magnified for political and religious reasons, and are now symbolic of the differences between India and Pakistan. Conversely, in China, Cantonese and Mandarin speakers cannot understand each other, and yet they will insist that they are speaking different dialects of Chinese, and not different languages. For them, a shared writing system and a strong tradition of political, social, and cultural unity form essential parts of their definition of language.

Even within India, the Hindi dialects spoken in the northern Hindi-Urdu Belt form a dialect continuum. Speakers of dialects that are geographically close to each other can understand each other, but it is improbable that a speaker of Marwari (Rajasthan) would understand someone talking in a Bhojpuri (Bihar) dialect due to all the differences accumulated in their varieties. On the other hand, people living in the border district of Palakkad use a dialect of Malayalam with distinct Tamil intonations, and can understand their Tamil-speaking counterparts in Coimbatore.

Apart from regions, dialects can also be an indicator of what social class you belong to. These are called sociolects. A sociolect can indicate your age, caste, occupation, education, racial or ethnic origin and can be categorized as socially prestigious or socially stigmatized. In a caste-based system like India, less educated people try to emulate the upper-caste sociolect by avoiding some sounds from their pronounciation (eg: the /r/ sound). In Kerala, the Kadappuram dialect used by fisherfolk is looked down upon while in Mumbai, there is a stigma associated with people who use Tapori Hindi as it is assumed that uneducated, lower-income groups speak this way.

A school in a rural Indian village

This inherent bias seeps into the education sector too. Children are often educated in the ‘prestige language’, be it liturgical (Sanskrit) or secular (English), or in the language of wider communication in the area, even if it is different from one’s home language. The regional dialects of a child are often ignored and actively discouraged. This can have far-reaching consequences. Learning is claimed to be better and more successful when conducted in the variety spoken by students as it enhances their social, cognitive, emotional and linguistic development. A classroom may have children from varying backgrounds and to them, their dialect is a part of their heritage and group identity as well as an instrument for the expression of culture.

In a multilingual and multidialectal society like India, a standard variety is used to equalize society. But many dialects and marginalized local languages face extinction due to this rampant standardization. Nihali is a language isolate spoken in Jalgaon Jahod in Maharashtra by around 2500 people. However, no tribal language is taught in the schools of Maharashtra. Even if a child speaks Nihali at home, once he enters a classroom, he instantly switches to Marathi. The continued disregard for the indigenous language or dialect might result in its vanishment. The use of the non-standard dialects in education helps the elevation of the status of the dialects in a society, erases the stigma associated with them and prevents their possible extinction.

References:

Language, Dialect and Varieties (from An Introduction to Sociolinguistics), Ronald Wardhaugh
Sociolinguistics: Goals, Approaches and Problems,Roger Bell (1976)
Languages of India: Pidginization/Creolization, Oceanic Linguistics Special Publications (1975).
Convergence and Creolization: A Case from the Indo-Aryan/Dravidian border in India, John J. Gumperz and Robert Wilson (1971)
Dialects in Schools and Communities, Carolyn Temple Adger, Donna Christian, and Walt Wolfram (1999)
The Use of Dialects in Education and Its Impacts on Students’ Learning and Achievements, Wondimu Tegegne

Reservoir Dogs: The Storytelling Motif

Mon, 02 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Movie: Reservoir Dogs (Quentin Tarantino, 1992)

Sequence: The Commode Story (1:06:42 to 1:14:06)

This blog post tries to understand the purpose of this sequence in the movie, and more importantly, the narrative devices used to effectualize the sequence. It also discusses the scene progression and shot composition choices made by Tarantino.

This sequence begins with Mr. Orange (or Freddy) reading out and eventually narrating ‘The Commode Story’. The story is a made-up anecdote presented to Joe Cabot, Nice Guy Eddie and Mr. White by Freddy about a drug deal gone awry. The story is set during the Los Angeles marijuana drought in 1986. At that time, Freddy had struck up another deal which required him to tag along for a sale at a train station. While he waited for the buyer, Freddy went to the men’s room, carrying the weed with him in a carry-on bag. As luck would have it, there were already four Los Angeles county sheriffs chatting inside, along with a German Shepherd. According to Freddy, they could ‘smell it, just like that fucking dog’ could. A panicking but quick-thinking Freddy simply played it cool and went about his business, and walked right out again.

The elaborate anecdote is meant to serve as a tool to help the criminals feel like they are getting to know Freddy better; the themes of drug dealing and implicit contempt for the police would also help him gain their acceptance as one of their own. Just as the Cabots felt familiar to Freddy after hearing his story, through a monologue or a few minutes of dialogue between characters, the film audience understands certain intricate characteristics of the criminals - Pink’s stance against tipping and Blonde’s loyalty to Joe Cabot among others. From a film maker’s point of view, the narration of the Commode Story is a tool to condense an eight minute monologue into an acted out sequence that holds the audience’s attention from start to finish. Through progressing from stationary shots of Freddy simply reading out the script to a shot of him fervently reciting the story within the bathroom sequence shows us the passage of time during which he practiced his script and finally presented it to the Cabots and Larry.

Narration Through Storytelling

The story makes the most obvious use of a motif used throughout the movie - storytelling. When Holdaway initially explains how to learn all four pages of the script, he tells Freddy to memorize what’s important and make the rest his own. He basically tells Freddy it’s about getting into character and saying the story as he perceived it; remembering the details and letting the listener fill in the blanks. All the listeners have access to is the story given to them by the narrator, from a particular point of view, with a particular set of details and context. For us, we are shown snippets of how each character joined the heist and how each of them reacted after the heist. However, just as Freddy left out the part where the deal actually went down, we are not shown the actual heist taking place. Unimportant to the narration of the story yet the plot point around which the story revolves, this portion is filled in by our imagination.

At this point in the story, the premise of the story has been built - a few scenes leading up to the heist have been shown through Blonde’s and White’s chapters, as well as the initial responses to its failure through altercations among Blonde, White and Pink. While the first act dealt with pinning the blame on someone and finding out who the rat is, the moment when Orange shoots Blonde and reveals that he is an undercover cop signals the beginning of Act 2. The Commode Story scene comes soon after this turning point and is vital to provide some context about Orange’s intentions.

Shot 1

The sequence starts with a full shot of Freddy on a rooftop in bright daylight. The mise-en-scene is bare and non-descript, the shot doesn’t reveal much about their surroundings except by the presence of a turret behind him. The camera tilts up to accommodate Holdaway when he enters the left side of the frame, his back to the camera but angled in such a way so that he’s facing the central axis of the camera. The shot is another example of a low angle shot used in the film, along with the previously used trunk shot.

The angle, coupled with the wide expanse of blue sky above their heads and the monochrome buildings accentuate the wide expanse of space that is generally associated with Los Angeles. The angle and shot composition also convey the sense of hope the ‘good guys’ have for their mission, while the colour palette of beige and dusty blue in the scene mellows the tone of the movie for a while. The location also helps Holdaway make good use of the space by theatrically enacting the importance of remembering the details in the scene.

Shot 2 (Montage)

The following montage sequence follows Freddy as he practices the script of the Commode Story. A common camera technique used is the stationary shot as Freddy paces back and forth, in and out of the frame. These medium shots with a cluttered depth of field indicate the passage of time, and transition from casually reciting the script in his bedroom, to emphatically practicing it in front of Holdaway in the graffiti yard, to actually delivering the anecdote before the Cabots and White.

In the graffiti shot, the shot composition framing Freddy in the center delivering his lines to an audience of one gives the impression of a theatrical run-through in front of the director, as the protagonist delivers his main monologue. Freddy’s vocal modulation and facial gestures substantially change from the bedroom to the yard, and he starts narrating the story as if it actually happened to him. This is the most apparent indicator of the progress he has made with respect to making the story ‘his own’.

Shot 3

Freddy’s narration continues as the scene shifts to the day of the actual meeting. The mise-en-scene is a nightclub partially filled with people dancing and multicoloured disco lights rotating on the ceiling. Nice Guy Eddie, Joe Cabot and Larry are sitting around a table, while Freddy is standing in front of them, cigarette lightly balanced in his mouth to show his casualness, narrating his story. The entire club is lit by a strong red background light that brings the background in shallow focus and illuminates the characters with a red glow. The location sound of dance music further highlights the fact that they are seated in a club, possibly disreputable, as seasoned criminals frequent it. However, Freddy is initially lit by a strong key light that gives the impression that he is under a spotlight of sorts. The fill light does nothing for the shadows on his face and they keep growing as the camera tracks/revolves around the table in question.

This over-the-shoulder shot frames Freddy in the center in a medium close-up. The tracking shot helps the audience be more involved in the space and conversation taking place, and adds depth to the background.

Shot 4

The scene suddenly transitions to a visual retelling of Freddy’s story. The camera follows him into a bare men’s room, lit by a moderate bright white light. The room is unrealistically bare and empty, it looks exactly like a scene made up in his mind, with only elements that serve the purpose of the story present in the mise-en-scene. The acting and delivery is not made realistic (in the sense that the time spent observing the policemen is exaggerated) so that the narration can catch up to the events taking place. This fact is further highlighted when Freddy in the washroom also starts narrating to the sheriffs. The camera is set at a low angle and tracks around him twice. This movement and composition elevates the tension in the scene to match the narration as he utters phrases like ‘Every nerve ending, all my senses, blood in my veins, everything I have is screaming..’. It gives a sense of being cornered.

This highly realistic and involved narration makes the audience much more engrossed in the story. Additionally, the camera revolves around him in the same way it did when he was surrounded by the Cabots and White. This brings forward a parallel between how he claimed to have been feeling during the police confrontation to what he was actually feeling as he talked to the criminals. The two situations are very similar; in both he panics but has to make an effort to appear nonchalant to stay safe. The storytelling motif makes another appearance here, as one of the sheriffs recounts a story within Freddy’s story about how he almost killed a civilian.

The entire men’s room scene has no extra diegetic sound other than the narration; the only sounds are that of the sheriffs’ conversation and the dog barking. However, when Freddy switches on the dryer, the loud noise essentially drowns everyone out for a few seconds and the clever use of sound escalates the tension again as it reaches a crescendo. The extreme close up of Freddy slowly drying his hands also serves this purpose. The camera tracks across the faces of the sheriffs in close ups and one almost expects a climax to the slow buildup in this part. However, it dies down and the scene reverts back to the nightclub.

The film’s non-linear storytelling style helps build momentum but also develop characters and highlights certain time instances. Like the rest of the film, the Commode Scene runs on the fuel of language, rather than tangible events. There is close to no background music solely so the audience focuses on the dialogue. Tarantino’s clever use of discontinuity editing in this particular scene with a montage to show the passing of time, and the switching of narrative between real and imaginary scenes adds a unique twist to the chapter.

Dallas Buyers Club: A Study In Lighting

Sat, 30 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Movie: Dallas Buyers Club (Jean Marc Vallee, 2013)

Sequence: Rayon goes to meet her father (1:24:07 to 1:26:51)

The sequence deals with Rayon meeting her estranged father to ask him for some money to help Ron and the club. The lighting choices used in this sequence showcases a hitherto unseen side of Rayon, and highlight the stark contrast between Rayon and Raymond.

Shot 1

The scene starts with a full length shot of a suited man, who we later recognize as Rayon, standing with her back to us at a bank reception. The surroundings look opulent; the counter is made of marble while the doors are gilded and ornate. The next shot is an over-the-shoulder shot, with the camera focusing on the pudgy man climbing down the stairs in the background. His eyes are fixed on Rayon, who is out of focus in this shot, and he coldly beckons her upstairs. The lighting in this room is soft and golden. The primary source of light is coming from the top left corner of the room off-screen. The scene is lit in such a way so that the yellow light does not reach Rayon’s back, which is visible to us. This creates an obvious contrast in the color temperature within the same frame. The back of Rayon’s neck looks pale and bluish while compared to the rosy glow on the other man’s face. This visual choice highlights Rayon’s sickness but more importantly, his exclusion from his father’s world. Unlike most of the places Rayon stays in, this waiting room is silent except for the clip-clop of footsteps and the occasional cough.

Shot 2

Inside the office, the next shot starts with an extreme close-up of Rayon’s hand picking up a family photo from a table near a window, where similar photos are arranged. The camera pans left until Rayon, or Raymond in this scene, settles into the right one-third of the frame. This is the first time the audience gets to see ‘Raymond’ and the camera is placed at a low-angle similar to the Point of View of someone sitting at a desk. The medium shot of Rayon reveals a person who is incredibly out of her element. Her constant fidgeting and guarded facial expression reveal she is highly uncomfortable and doesn’t quite trust the person she’s talking to. Rayon’s attire, an ill-fitting black suit that obviously doesn’t belong to her, further accentuates the fact that she doesn’t belong to her father’s world. This is not the Rayon we know. Compared to the woman who regularly wears electric-blue eyeshadow and a faux fur coat, this Rayon seems drab and lifeless. The lighting in this shot helps our argument. The key light is the sunlight or white light coming in from the window to the right of the frame. It perfectly illuminates half her face, giving her an almost ghostly complexion. The fill light comes from the left background, from a large chandelier hanging behind her. The strange positioning of the fill light casts a golden shadow on the left side of her face. This partition seems to signify Rayon’s duality - on one side, she is colourful, charming and kind-hearted, and on the other, she is a husk of a person, repressed and ignored.

The back light in this shot comes from the window directly behind her but is not as strongly lit as the background light itself. Next to Rayon, multiple family photos are seen, but none of them even hint at her existence.

Shot 3

In the next shot, Rayon’s father occupies the left half of the frame. It is an over-the-shoulder shot, with an out-of-focus chin bobbing at the top right corner of the screen. At first glance, Rayon’s father does not strike a very imposing figure; he is balding, quite chubby and can’t even keep his tie straight. Instead, he seems to symbolize the conservative majority in the USA at the time - condescending, slow to accept change and a ‘family man’. The furniture and props on and around his desk don’t reveal much about his personality. The desk just has papers, folders and pens, with a few more family pictures. Behind him, the wood panelled walls have no concept of depth and look like they’re engulfing the small man lounging in his leather arm chair, blissfully ignorant about the troubles of the world. The absence of back light makes it seem like he is two-dimensional, a striking similarity to the flatness of his character itself.

The only surprising item he owns is a bright green lamp, a jarring contrast to the colour scheme maintained in the sequence uptil now. The lamp(s) sticks out like a sore thumb, and in a lot of ways resembles Rayon in his own family.

Shot 4

After Rayon returns home, she strips herself of her masculine clothes and starts reapplying her makeup. When the scene starts, the camera pans to capture what seems like a silhouette of Rayon against the harsh background light. Framed almost at the centre, the medium close up of her bare back slowly moving away from the camera portrays a sense of isolation and intense vulnerability. The quiet diegetic ambient sound only magnifies this sense. The shallow depth of field pulls the focus to Rayon and her current mental state.

As Rayon applies her makeup to ‘look pretty’, the framing of the shot and low camera angle seek to give the audience a closer look at her own sense of self, to be an unseen observer as she talks to herself in one of her most vulnerable moments. The subjective shot which captures both Rayon and her mirror image uses a prop like a mirror as a tool to imply that the moment we are witnessing is extremely private. The monologue from this scene also foreshadows Rayon’s death two scenes later. Techniques of discontinuity editing have been used here to convey Rayon’s distress in a short amount of time, through a montage-esque series of shots of her making herself feel like her old glamourous self again.

A noticeable trait in the shooting style of the scenes in question, and the movie as a whole is the use of a handheld camera for most, if not all the shots. There is a slight jitter or shake in almost all the shots, which lends the movie the feel of a documentary. Moreover, the reduced number of cameras meant there were very few cuts and takes were longer. This ensured that a cut wouldn’t distract the audience from the intense acting. Even though Dallas Buyers Club was not a documentary in content or structure, this approach helped it have that subtle quality of capturing reality.

kryptography

Appacha

Kant's True Vocation Of Reason

India as a Linguistic Area

Structural and Lexical Similarities

References:

Languages, Dialects and Social Behaviour

Criteria for a Language

A Political Difference

Social Aspects

References:

Reservoir Dogs: The Storytelling Motif

Narration Through Storytelling

Shot 1

Shot 2 (Montage)

Shot 3

Shot 4

Dallas Buyers Club: A Study In Lighting

Shot 1

Shot 2

Shot 3

Shot 4