Normality in Goa

This is the first time I saw eight o’clock from the right side, as in I’d just woken up. Finally our bodies couldn’t take it anymore and a three hour sprint nap last night turned into a full on 12 hour sleep marathon. We woke up at eight and, not surprisingly, felt a great deal better for all of that.

It’s nice to feel human again. Near the end of the hard party, hard living, little sleeping thing that we were on I had forgotten what normality was like. I was actually starting to worry if I’d ever actually encounter normality again. That’s the funny thing about me, I can never party too long. If I overdo anything then very quickly I start to no longer enjoy it and that’s with everything, from partying to reading, to drinking, to dancing, to women to everything else you can think up (including work).

Hopefully a day of rest will give me the energy for when the rest of my friends arrive. One is coming in tomorrow from Singapore (thereby reuniting the group that did both Sri-Lanka and Vietnam) and two more arriving the day after from Bangalore. Then we’ll be six and a party force to be reckoned with. We’ll suck the resources of this island dry, I tell you!

Well, anyway. I’ve now found internet so I’ll be able to keep you better up to date as to what’s going on in my life. So on that note I’ll end this one and go have my breakfast. Food has, unfortunately, been one of the things that has been left out of the last few days.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Years!

Goa

Goa has so far been a hedonistic, insane ride through a space that is both joyful and frightening, but that’s jumping ahead. It starts on Friday, when I was still in Bangalore. It was my last day so we had to celebrate it. Since we were leaving at five the next morning we wisely decided to stay up the night. That was the first night missed. We cat napped in the car for a bit (it took 15 hours, the driver took the wrong route) then hit Goa at 10 in the evening. We drove straight down to the beach, after having dumped our bags in the hotel (we’re searching for a new one) and we prowled for a party. We bounced around between a few bars and people on the road, which led to Paradiso.

Paradiso is on Aljuna beach, so it has everything associated with Aljuna beach; beggars, pushers, gawkers, poppers, snorters, drinkers, stoners, dancers, consumers, pervers, talkers and wankers. Plus you could drink what ever you wanted for a thousand rupees. Bonus.

That closed at 4. From there we went to Paga and hit an all night bar there. It was actually a club, but nobody paid the entry fee, with everybody hanging in the bar section out front. Here the drinks did cost money, but Goa is known to be the cheapest state to drink in in India. Next came the actual beach, where they were just starting to put out the beach chairs. Sunrises are fantastic if you’ve partied the whole night. We stayed there till about three, headed home and slept for five hours. Some of us ate, other didn’t.

We decided to hit a different party. We ended up at West End, which was kind of cool; stayed there until six. They were playing pretty good trance. We got talking to some guys that have been coming here for a long time and they told us where they hung on the beach. That was our next destination.

Once there we sat around a table in that beach hut the whole day and soaked up the Goan atmosphere. We didn’t sleep, we just kept going. Slowly the beach hut got fuller and the party more frenzied. It’s all a bit of a blur at this point, but the day lasted somewhere between a minute and an eternity.

Then, finally at night we went to a club further down the beach. There we partied till about six but I can honestly admit that by the end of it I was sleep walking through life. We finally went home and crashed out for a good length. I actually already fell asleep in the taxi back, with my self so far unconscious that I didn’t even notice that I was banging my head into the window.

Will I be able to survive this for a month?

Plans and Reality

I’m sitting in the car, a bit punch drunk from too little sleep, too much alcohol and too many hours on the road. We left at six in the morning. We were told that it would only be a six hour journey, ten if the traffic is really bad. The traffic has been great and it is now three thirty. That means we’ve been going for nine hours and we’re not there yet.

Originally the plan was to go down to Goa on a bike with a friend. This is the same friend who drove us to Nandi Hills. Then we somehow arranged a car and were planning to drive down (four of us plus the driver) and then he went and got into a fight. He broke his nose and he’ll be coming down to Goa four days later.

This guy has a natural talent for having weird things happen to him. That’s part of the reason he’s fun to hang around. At least you know it won’t be an ordinary experience. I’ve done ordinary and I’m all game for new stuff. In this case the new experience is that he’s not actually here with us in the car.

He was also, however, the person who told us that we’d be on the road for only six hours, so that I’m not too terribly happy about. I think if it takes us much longer I’ll wait till his nose is healed and then break it again. I can’t imagine having to do this trip on the back of a bike. It would have been quite a drain, I imagine. It’s been more than draining enough already, though admittedly drinking all night last night and not sleeping might have something to do with that.

We weren’t able to do the editing yesterday; so now the producer, the assistant director and the director of photography are sitting together in an editing booth doing the editing. I wonder how it will turn out. Sometimes they call me for advice on specific shots, but in general the ball is now in their court.

Personally, though this was not the desired situation, I think it might actually work better this way. These guys don’t know the stuff that’s all going through my head, so they can judge the material much more objectively than I can. They can say ‘but wait, this doesn’t make any sense’ and then try to do something about it. I’ll just have to wait and see how it turns out. Its kind of nice not to know what it looks like. Then I can imagine it’s absolutely brilliant for a while longer.

It might actually be absolutely brilliant, the only thing is that it was my first time out so it’s very possible that it isn’t. I’ll have to wait and see, probably for quite a long time too.

The shooting

After a creative process is finished I always feel kind of empty. Understandable, really, seeing as I’ve basically just invested a huge amount of time (and above all thought) into it, to ignore such immeasurable like passion and soul.

Sometimes it’s a bad empty, but this time around it is a good empty. It’s the kind of empty that I can now fill in with the good things from life around me, knowing that I did my utmost in the last stage to create something good. Will the end product actually be good? I don’t know. It was my first time out as a director and I’m sure I made a bunch of mistakes that experience would have eliminated.

The shoot itself was a grueling affair. We started at seven in the morning (though we were supposed to start at six, go figure) and were officially supposed to end by six in the evening. We didn’t. In fact we didn’t by a long shot. We ended at 1:30 the next morning.

This was for a ten minute short film!

As the director of the short film I had a whole bunch of people looking to me for final decisions and directions. Somehow I made them all, without thinking too long or waffling too much. It was really mind boggling that I was pretty much the youngest on the set, yet everybody was looking to me for guidance.

Not once did anybody question me either. They would offer alternative suggestions, but this was always in the spirit of aiding the creative process, rather than undermining me. (I believe I am now a good enough reader of character that I can figure out when somebody means something positively and when they mean it with malice in their heart). Hell, some people were even trying their hardest to impress me.

I too tried to impress everybody else, of course. Mainly by working twice as hard and being twice as positive. I don’t know if I succeeded in either, but I know that my feet hurt like hell, by the end of it. I ran around giving directions, looking at different angles and making sure that the effect I wanted was the effect I got. I think by working as hard as I did I motivated everybody else to continue working, without complaining, for 17 hours. I’m sure that in the movie industry even that isn’t that regular of an occurrence. It could also just be that I had an amazing crew, put together by an amazing producer (who worked three times as hard and was three times as positive as everybody else).

All in all it was an exhausting but inspiring day. I just hope it shows in the final product.

Beginning of the End

Last Saturday was my full last Saturday in Bangalore and we celebrated it in style. First we went to probably the coolest party I've had a chance to see here in the entire four months I was here and then we partied till dawn on my roof top. We had the necessary enhancers to make the party (trip?) very memorable. That's good, because I decided somewhere in the small hours that this would probably be my farewell party.

It's always funny when you're walking around a city for the last week. You walk around and constantly think 'this might well be the last time that I come here and do this'. It makes you really pay attention to what's going on and what had become just mundane, suddenly gets a new dimension.

How does it feel? Bitter sweet, I'd say. I've been talking about leaving this place for the last month of posts now, but it's only when it comes to the crunch that you realise what you're leaving behind. I still have no regrets about going (Bangalore should not be my home) but I'll certainly miss some places and, more importantly, some of the people that have become my friends while I've been down here. Fortunately almost everybody I know that I've come to call a friend is also leaving the city, scattering around the region and indeed the world. That way when I got somewhere new, at least I'll (hopefully) have somebody that I already know there to show me around.

What becomes interesting now is to see whether I can build up a network of friends and acquaintances as quickly in the next place as I did over here. Truth be told, there were certain elements in my favour here that I might not have in the next place. First off all, the first guy I met (I talked about him at length a couple of months ago) really helped me by connecting me to dozens, if not hundreds, of people. In the literature about social networking that I've been looking at they call this type of a person a 'connector'. Some people just have an ability to keep a much larger social network than the average person. I'm hoping to become one of these people, but for right now I need to use those types of people to build up a network quickly.

So will I meet another connector in the next place I go? Let's wait and see. I'm definitely going to try. I have to say, I thoroughly enjoyed hitting a city not knowing anybody and within a few months having a phone book that's bursting at the seams. Not only do I enjoy it, but it has been tremendously helpful. I wouldn't have got even close to finishing this short if it wasn't for the huge number of people that I could ask for advice and aid.

I'm nervous and excited, both about the filming (this Thursday) and the road trip (this Saturday). I just hope there's nothing to be nervous about and everything to be excited about. Ultimately, of course, that's all my own responsibility.

Neuro Linguistic Programming

That’s actually something completely different, Amazonian, but I can certainly try to help you there. What you’re talking about is not outside of you, but rather inside of you. You’re trying to create a mood or feeling of interest in something that you might actually not be interested in.

This is actually something that NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) tries to tackle. I’m currently studying NLP myself, but I’ll admit straight away that I’m not a pro. Heck, I’m barely a student. Still, I might be able to give you some pointers.

First an explanation: according to NLP the mind, emotions and the body are different aspects of the same thing. They are not separate and there is no point where one begins and the other ends. They don’t just blur into each other, they are each other. I know that’s hard to accept, but in this case it’s best to suspend your disbelief and go along with it. If you influence one, you also influence the other two.

This is very important, because in NLP you often use the most accessibly (i.e. the body) to influence the less accessible areas (unless you happen to have an axe). It also means that you’re frequently unconsciously influencing your emotions and your ideas, simply by way of your body posture.

When there is a discrepancy between these three aspects, this becomes very uncomfortable for the person and they will try their best to fix the internal inconsistency. This normally means that the two areas that are inconsistent will move towards each other. If, however, you consciously force one area, (for example you continue to smile, even though you don’t want to) the other areas will be forced to adjust till everything is consistent again (in other words, you begin to feel happy).

What’s more, you can link one specific type of emotion or mental state to a physical action. This is what they call ‘Anchoring’. How do you anchor? As followed. Go back in your memory to an event where you felt the emotion or mental state that you’re trying to re-awaken. (You see, you don’t just remember the facts of an event, but also the emotions and the ideas associated with it). Next sit down and remember as much as you can about that particular instant. Start with one sense and then stack the other four on top. When you do this, you’ll find that you start feeling like you did then.

Now, just before you max out on the emotion do a physical action that you normally wouldn’t do. For example, touch the tip of your thumb to your ring finger, or pull your ear lobe. After that, clear your mind (walk around, smoke a cigarette, what ever) and repeat the process. Do this a number of times (five to ten) and you’ll find that if you repeat the action the emotion or frame of mind will come to you automatically. It is important that you anchor before you hit the max, otherwise you might start anchoring the emotion of the downward slide on the other side of the peak, which is not what you want.

So, to sum up: Make sure that your posture and your features express the feeling you’re trying to have (attentiveness) and, if that is not enough, anchor a time when you felt attentive and then use the physical anchor to recall that state when you need to. PS: it helps to anchor in the same space where you want to then later use that anchor. The space, in that case, then becomes an anchor for the feeling.

Hope that helps.

Reading People

I don’t claim to be a star at reading other people (I’m a man, after all), but I’ve managed to pick up a few things along the way and I thought I’d throw them your way as well, in the hope that at least some of the ideas might be useful.

First off, reading other people isn’t a science, it’s an art and though you can be pretty certain about what somebody is thinking, you can never be absolutely certain. Take everything that you gleam from another person with the knowledge that you might have misinterpreted what’s going on. What that means is that you should always be willing to revise the view you have of another person when you gain new information.

Okay, now on to the juicy stuff. You can’t not communicate. That’s an important one (and probably one that I’ve already thrown your way, but never mind). This is true for everybody. That doesn’t mean that everybody is unable to physically shut up, obviously that’s not the case for most people (though I’ve met a few exceptions). It just means that even just with their body posture people are communicating to the others around them. Unfortunately for the people around them (and often fortunately for the people doing the communicating) people don’t really notice these body signals.

The way to notice these body signals is to stop dwelling in your own head and really pay attention to the people around you. Don’t worry about what you’re going to say or do next, but instead pay attention to what other people are saying and doing. Often what you’re going to say next will come to you naturally as a result of their words. I find that this has the secondary benefit of reducing my nervousness and anxiety, as I’m too busy watching the other person to notice my own doubts and worries. The way to get better at understand body signals is reading. You’ll have to pick up a book on body language as trail and error is just too slow of a process, unless you’ve already got a natural knack.

Secondly, don’t focus completely on what a person is saying. Listening well requires you to not just listen to what a person is saying, but also to how they say it (tone) and what they are doing while they say it (body language). In truth you don’t really want to hear what a person says, but rather what they are trying to say. Often, if a specific sentence might be interpreted in many ways, it is these other indicators that will tell you what interpretation to go with. If words and body language disagree (for example somebody says they don’t like you, even as they reach out and touch you) nine times out of 10 it’s the body language that speaks the truth. It’s easy to lie with words, much harder to lie with actions.

Thirdly, your own actions are a good indicator for how other people will work. If you notice certain things happening to you when you lie, or when you’re happy, or when you’re having a good conversation, or anything else, really, then you might suppose that those same signs mean the same with other people. Again, this is not a law cast in stone. People aren’t the same and will react different in different situations. Nonetheless, your own actions and their underlying emotions are a pretty good indicator of other what other people’s actions might mean.

Alright, that's it for this post. If anybody wants more exact examples I’ll be glad to supply them, all they have to do is ask.

Liar revisited

When I first came to India I wrote a post about how people just lied straight to your face; the last couple of weeks that has been reinforced. Lots of people have promised a great many things with very few of them actually delivering on their promises. It’s been terribly frustrating, as it has meant that our project has been unnecessarily delayed by weeks at a time. We think we have something in the bag and then we very quickly come to realise that we were far too quick to assume success.

What is more, even when they do agree to do something and really do it, what we often find is that they don’t do it on time! They will say ‘we’ll meet tomorrow morning and work out the legal details’ next thing we know, they haven’t called back till the evening that same day, to say that they need more time.

They have no concept of being in a hurry. Everything here takes a lot longer than it needs to. For example, take the traffic. I think most people in Bangalore waste at least an hour a day stuck in traffic jams. They take it good naturedly, but that’s actually just an indication of how they think. Everything here moves at a bumbling pace that, after Singapore, I find very difficult to work with. This might sound like racism and it probably is, but I’m going to say it anyway: the Indians are intelligent, sophisticated and cultured; but they’re also dishonest, materialistic and bad at meeting deadlines.

Every country, I’m sure, has its drawbacks. It’s just a matter of learning to live with them. The problem is that I’ve still not learned to live with the negative aspects of Indian culture. I just hope that we can still pull this project out of our asses and get everything finished by the deadlines that we’ve set. We’d better, as we’ve already booked the cameras, the studio and the actor. To try and move those to another day might prove extremely hard (though they don’t meet their deadlines themselves, they certainly expect you to live up to your obligations.)

What’s more, I’m really not up for moving my date of going to Goa back any further. I want to get out of Bangalore. It’s a nice place and I’ll certainly come back, but I’m supposed to be traveling around, seeing the sites. So far I’ve only seen a traffic choked city and lots of meeting rooms.

Life is not all fun and games and if it was, we’d get bored of them real fast. Still, it would be nice if things would actually work out as we’ve planned them.

Good things

12 days till cameras roll. For the last few days we’ve been storyboarding. What is storyboarding? (I didn’t really know until a few weeks ago, so I’m going to assume that some of you don’t know either). Storyboarding is basically the act of drawing a picture for every shot that you’re planning to use during the film. Of course, before we did the storyboarding I really didn’t have a clue what shots I was going to use, so we hired a professional storyboarder and he sat down with me and made me work out my shots.

In total it took seven hours. Let me say that again, it took seven hours to storyboard a seven minute short. One hour per minute. And the final pictures haven’t even been drawn yet; those will be produced over the next three days.

Basically what we were doing was deciding what camera angles would best advance the script. We had to interpret the underlying meaning of every scene and then bring that out through the camera positions.

The thing is, the storyboarder is just going wild on this script. He loves it (something that I’m rather proud of) and has created two three-dimensional sets, using a computer program and Styrofoam.

The learning curve on this project has been quite tremendous. Numerous times during the last few weeks I’ve done things I’ve never done before, discussed things I’ve never discussed before and thought about things that I’ve never thought about before.

That is, of course, a good thing. The whole trip so far has had a pretty steep learning curve. In fact, I think I’ve changed a lot (I first wanted to write grown, but I’m not sure that’s the right word yet). A good mate from Singapore is going to meet me in Goa and I wonder if he’ll think I’ve changed. It will be interesting to bring something from my old life into my new one. It might be quite jarring, actually. Again, that’s a good thing.

I wonder what the future holds. I have no idea. Yet again, that’s a good thing.

Self importance

All of us believe that we are more important than we are. This is commonly referred to as the 'Halo' effect. It is in our nature to exagerate our own self-importance. In fact, in a way we aren't, because in our own world we really are as important as we think we are. It is only when we try to incorperate our own percieved self-mportance with the world view of others that we walk into a wall. Funnily enough, many people don't even realise that they have just walked into one.

When I say everybody believes they are more important than they are I do really mean everybody. Though there might be exceptions, I haven't met any yet. Some people might say 'how about those people who are depressed?' well, a person who is depressed is also almost always self-obsessed. They regard their own missery of primary importance, with everything else (including other people) secondary. 'What about people who are shy, don't they do that because they believe they aren't important?' No, not really. In fact they are saying exactly the opposite. most shy people don't realise this, but what they are really saying is 'I matter so much in other people's lives that they will actually think about the stupid things I've said and the talk about the stupid things I've done.'

People with low self-esteem? Low self-esteem doesn't mean low sense of importance. In fact, often people with low self-esteem believe that they aren't equiped to deal with the tasks life has thrown in their way, as if life cares enough about them to actually set up individual tasks!

So am I advocating that you shouldn't try to fight this self-importance and lower your vision of yourself? No, not at all. I believe exactly the opposite. You feel self-important for a reason, that's because you are making sure you survive. That's your job, that's your obligation. You shouldn't be embarassed that you see yourself as more important as everybody else. Instead you should embrace it.

You should utilise it.

If you believe yourself important then that means you'll have the courage to ask for what you believe you deserve. Ultimately what you get is what you ask for, mixed in with what others believe you deserve. The more your willing to ask, the more you will generally get. What is more, when you truly believe in your own self-importance, you will find other people will start to believe it to. These people can then help you get what you believe you deserve. Tasks will become much easier, because people will be willing to help you complete them.

A belief in your own self-importance will also often lead to a feeling of self-confidence and it is self-doubt (the opposite of self-confidence) that most often gets in the way. Always question yourself, but never doubt. Easier said than done, but a good one to remember, anyway.

on energy and criticism

Today I had a very invigorating conversation with the actor of our piece, his friend (a camera man) and our producer. Yes, we now have an actor (it was confirmed a short while ago).

The thing is that when you write a piece you can never quite disassociate what you think you’re saying from what you’re actually saying. For somebody who’s just reading the script that is, of course, not the problem. They only get what you said, filtered through their own perception.

Some preconceived notions about how I saw the short were obviously wrong. I thought there was a number of elements playing through the short that were simply not there; while there were certain other elements that I hadn’t even considered that were there.

I have to say, receiving criticism on your work is never nice, but I tried to take it as best I could. Now I have to sit down again (tonight preferably) and rework the script to incorporate those suggestions of theirs that I think might improve the script. First, though, I have to sit down and actually decide which of their suggestions might actually improve it. It looks like I’ve got a hard night’s work ahead of me (I say night, because the day is far too busy with meeting – by the look of things – to give me time to really work on anything much except my conversational skills).

Still, things are more positive now. I’m reinvigorated about the project, with the slight dejection of the last few days slowly fading. Slowly we’re cutting down enough of the trees to see the forest once again (even if it may be a little smaller).

Our date of shooting has now been set for the 20th of December. It’s nice to have a date to work towards. In that way at least there is an obvious end in sight for the entire thing. When you know something is going to end, it makes it that much easier to last through the time that still remains; something along the lines of ‘this too shall pass’.

Three more weeks. The question then becomes: will I be better off before that deadline, with work to do and something to look forward towards, or will I be better off after when my worries – and my drive – drop away.

Only time will tell.