Democracy is:

Democracy is a movie. Not just one but two movies by the same name.

I knew I would be under the hammer for not submitting my blog. It was the second of the two blogs that we had to submit a week earlier that had my mind hung like a virus infected PC. It was the perfectionist in me that just wouldn’t get satisfied with an ordinary article. The result-I was just able to write a paragraph. “I don’t want to hear excuses”, the master said and he was right.

Angles were what we discussed and it was not even a geometry class. These were story angles that were neither acute nor obtuse but captivating. I was amazed at the fact that even a mundane article idea could have such amazing facets to be explored. For instance I had never realized that an article about a tour could have a socio economic angle.

After a couple of hours of discussions on story angles the master made us watch two short movies. According to him these were two of the ten entries from Nepal to a short film making competition organized worldwide.

The first movie showed movement of vehicles on some of the busiest roads of Kathmandu. The cinematographer had also filmed crowded streets with piles of garbage. Music played in the background. It was jazz funk. Soon a rapper appeared who said that democracy is not about blaming for black outs, neither it is about blaming for garbage piles on street and killings. We should save it all. The movie ends with the statement that democracy is a movement. I found the content of the movie clichéd. It has been used many a times by popular rappers and newspaper columnists alike. The use of moving vehicles was overdone. The use of rap with jazz was innovative though. We watched the movie two times. In spite of that I could not make sense of the message the movie was trying to deliver.

The opening sequence of the second movie had pigeons. Then there was a lady with an accentuated voice handling dozens of eggs. These were said to be democracy eggs. Each of the eggs was labeled with a name of a country. One by one she picked up the eggs and cracked them up. First of all she cracked the egg labeled Nepal which showed rotten democracy. China didn’t crack. South and North Korea had paper chits. Both when combined read good democracy if both unite. Pakistan and Afghanistan rattled. Iraq gave a dead chic. At last America gave a live chick. At the end of the movie two hands fly a pigeon and then the movie ends. The content was simple but the presentation was effective and interesting. The use of a woman with accentuated voice didn’t make any sense. The first and last part of the movie showed pigeons while the middle showed eggs. This didn’t make any sense to me.

The fact that these movies were made within a short period of time with limited budget makes me appreciate them. I think the whole idea behind them was to make people think about the meaning that democracy holds in their life. In this context the movies were successful at least in my case. So what is democracy for you?

For me democracy is a word with an elusive meaning which I am yet to decipher.