My best journeys

Ever wondered what are some of your best journeys? I have had many enjoyable train or plane trips with friends and colleagues – but a few that I look back with fond memory are the ones where I travelled alone. While fun and chitchat with others may be pleasant activities – sometimes our most cherished memories are of times that are spent with ourselves.

 I remember the Jet Airways flight that I took from Bombay to Calcutta – in the summer of 2002. I resigned from I-Sec, and was to join Irevna in two weeks. I was leaving behind the worries of the old job, and the joining date at the new job is still some time away – so the next two weeks promised to be blissful. I was leaving Bombay as well – a city I passionately hated. Overall, I felt very much at peace. The almost empty flight added to the tranquil experience. That was a journey where everything felt nice and perfect – the food, the air-hostesses, the dark sky outside.

 My other favourite journeys were to do with two absorbing cinemas that I watched on my laptop on those trips. One was a evening flight from Chennai to Delhi – where I watched Hotel Rwanda for the first time. Chennai-Delhi is a long, 2 hour 45 minute journey, but I was so totally immersed in the movie, I hardly noticed. Towards the last one hour – they dim the light in the aircraft, which is just as well, as you do not want anybody to notice if tears come to your eyes at the end of the movie. This still remains one of most moving cinemas that I ever watched.

 Recently, after one of my Bangalore trips, I came back by Shatabdi to Chennai. I managed to watch two movies in the train – one of which, ‘Do the right thing’, stayed with me for many days after my viewing, making sure I will always remember this trip with fondness. It is a story about a neighborhood where racial tensions erupt, resulting in tragic consequences. In spite of the heavy subject, two-thirds of the movie is fun – where you get to know the characters with all their idiosyncrasies. You like some of them, you are amused by some of the others – but you really do not feel that any of them is evil, which is why the ending is particularly unfortunate. This movie is a reminder that sometimes circumstances can turn a bunch of good, well-meaning people into adversaries.

 There are experiences that transport you to another world for a brief while. While the real ones come only rarely to our lives, movies are great substitutes, and they are plentiful.

Movies as a learning device

There are two things I am currently passionate about – movies and learning. By learning – I do not mean I am trying to learn (which may also be true), but more about what drives learning, and how to impart it well. Often my twin passion of learning and movies intersect – and that makes for some fascinating possibilities.

Let me first talk about more concrete subjects like history, economics or sciences. History was always thought to be such a boring subject in the schools – and that’s a pity – because history is full of stories (stories by definition should be more interesting than abstract theory). And there is clearly a lot to learn from history – whatever mistakes you are making today, have already been made many times over in the past! Similarly, Economics was also considered drab – but it is a subject that helps you explain the world around, and can solve real-life issues.

Something like history certainly can be taught much better through movies. For example – there are nice movies about American presidents (Young Mr Lincoln, JFK, Nixon), there are intensely absorbing movies about World War II (Schindler’s list, The pianist, Downfall – to name a few). For the story of Indian independence, we have Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi, and some others. We do not really need to have movies on exact topics of history – it is enough as long as they generate the learning appetite for different historical periods, so that there is a desire to learn more.

Other than concrete subjects like these, movies can be powerful tool in teaching ‘softer’ topics like leadership, communication, ethics etc. There are numerous movies which can illustrate various elements of leadership – my personal favorites are Hotel Rwanda and Gandhi. Negotiation and group dynamics can be demonstrated through 12 angry men (we have a Hindi version – Ek ruka hua faisla). Ethical issues and breaches are made much more vivid in movies like Judgment at Nuremberg or Wall Street. (or a particularly black and white demonstration of ethical slide – see the documentary on Enron). I remember we had training sessions on presentation delivery using speeches from various movies – Al Pacino’s speech in the Scent of a woman, and Michael Douglas’ “Greed is good” speech in Wall street.

We spent better part of our student days mugging Ampere’s law, the exact date for the battle of Panipat and such other nonsense – when learning could have been so much more fun.