Doodles & The Subconscious

I have been doing it for as long as I can remember. As a kid, it was mostly the margins of The Hindu. Notebooks were spared, as they were frequently examined at school.

Now my notepads, printouts, meeting minutes are full of it : Solid Os, Ds , circles, landscapes, textures, cartoons, geometry shapes and irregular forms.

Give me a pencil and a piece of paper and there is more than a 90% chance, you will find it. And it's all driven by my subconscious.

Honestly, I have no clue as to what I am doing when I am doing it or what I end up doing. Something that seems to start small at the margins, ends up taking up the whole page, time permitting.

Anytime is a good time, especially phone conversations, lecture sessions, meetings or idle time at the workstation.

Doodles, as the world calls them, is defined by Wikipedia as a type of sketch, an unfocused drawing made while a person's attention is otherwise occupied. They are simple drawings which can have a meaning, a shape or just irregular forms.

This somehow seems to explain my fascination for the abstract & the surreal. If you look at Jackson Pollack or Wassily Kandinsky or other abstract artists, their paintings are doodles at heart, subconsciously spontaneous, albeit at a much grander scale. Everything is fluid, non-representational, open to interpretation, with no visual reference to the real world...qualities I love in any art form.

Now the question that pops up is do they have meaning, can their interpretations reveal the subconscious. Pundits seem to think so, studying them with same fervor as handwriting analysis or dream interpretation.

There is a lot of literature on Doodle interpretations with location on the page consistently suggested as the most significant aspect of understanding a doodle.

Now it feels like doodles are a part of my identity, as unique as myself. As long as my teammates don't take offense to my doodling in meetings, my subconscious will keep firing away.

IMDb 250, my new quest

What do the following have in common Casablanca, Pulp Fiction, Cidade de Deus, Shichinin no samurai, Alien, Blade Runner, Star Wars, 2001:A space odyssey, Ying xiong, The Shawshank Redemption ...

These with 250 others make the current IMDb Top 250 and are heralded as the best in cinematic experience.

Most of these ushered in a new era of technical innovations with visionary narratives, futuristic concepts and above all redefined the art of story telling as never seen or done before. So great was their influence, now deemed cult classics, they spawned a whole new breed of literature, video games, merchandise, television series and sequels.

So what elevates these movies into a league of their own, IMHO, is predominately the concept/script. No wonder most of these are adaptations of literature - be fiction, non-fiction or comic books. Having visionaries like Spielberg, Kubrick, Wachowski bros, Tarantino, Hitchcock, Lucas, Pixar studios spearheading these doesn't hurt either.

I appreciate good cinema. It fuels your imagination and serves as an escape to a virtual world. And while you are there, you can make your own rules, live your dreams, experience a gamut of emotions and do whatever your free will desires. The story lines will truly astound and amaze you, rattle your notions of what, why and how of life, form and matter, question your beliefs and understanding of things and lead you into the unknown abyss. ...And it's this expanding of mind's horizons that is the most gratifying aspect of this whole experience.

Now...take an educated guess as to how many you would have already watched...70%? 60%?. I, for one, consider myself a movie buff, and my viewership is at 80 movies, a dismal 30%. Surprised? ..Well, I was.

Some of those on the list are at least a couple of decades old. So unless you go out of your way to watch them..you never will. And when you watch them, you have to be cognizant of the era they were made in and what it would have meant...undoubtedly true pioneers of the art form.

So, if you have a taste for good cinema, watch these and be in awe of the vastness & boundlessness of human creativity and potential.