“The untrodden path: In films and in software development” by Anoop Velayudhan, FRM

Thoughts on ‘Form, Content and Style’ have been playing on my mind for quite some time ever since Mr.Mohan, Chairman of the Kerala State Film Awards Jurymade a public statement about why ‘Premam’ the blockbuster Malayalam film directed by Mr.Alphonse Puthren could not bag the coveted State Film award. Premam, I feel, was never intended to bag a best film/best director award. It was an out and out commercial film which achieved what it set out to achieve. Although we want to believe that it is after an objective evaluation of films that film awards are conferred, it cannot be entirely true, as film appreciation and evaluation is essentially a very personal and subjective process. Hence it would have been enough for Mr.Mohan, Chairman of the Kerala State Film Awards Jury, to tell the media, by way of an explanation for Premam not bagging an award, if at all he owed an explanation, that the Jury didn’t find Premam to be a deserving candidate. Instead, as reported in The Hindu daily dated 06th March 2016, he chose to state that the first part of the film did not conform to a ‘form’ or ‘structure’ that is expected of movies. The senior professional that he is, Mr.Mohan might be having enough reasons for believing what he said. But I have utterly failed to understand the logic behind his assertion, since it is tantamount to stating that all films should follow a fixed style, a form cast in steel, and that film makers do not have the freedom to experiment with the form. In this context, it will be interesting to see what Picasso has said about his style: “…..I am probably a painter without style. ‘Style’ is often something that ties the artist down and makes him look at things in one particular way, the same technique, the same formulas, year after year, sometimes for a whole lifetime. You recognize him immediately, for he is always in the same suit, or a suit of the same cut. There are, of course, great painters who have a certain style. However, I always thrash about rather wildly. I am a bit of a tramp. You can see me at this moment, but I have already changed, I am already somewhere else. I can never be tied down, and that is why I have no style…..”. Also noteworthy is what Shmoop Editorial Team wrote about Samuel Beckett’s masterpiece ‘Waiting for Godot’, in an article published in 2008. According to them the work was revolutionary for what it lacked: real plot, discernible character development, and any sort of adherence to dramatic traditions.

Now let’s come back to the particular case of the form of the first half of Premam, which revolves around, as Mr.Mohan puts it, “a few rudderless youth trying to woo a girl, with only her father opposing it”. He complains about lack of clarity in this part of the film. Well, I believe that there cannot be a better compliment to the director. Samuel Beckett has said about James Joyce’s work that, for Joyce content is form and form is content, and that his work is not about something, but that something itself. As far as the case of Beckett himself goes, there is this fusion of content and form in ‘Waiting for Godot’. Even as the characters in Waiting for Godot undertake a futile and meaningless wait for Godot (whoever he is), the readers too are hoping against hope for something to happen in the seemingly boring play. Thus the play is just not about meaningless waiting, it is the waiting itself. Much water has flown under the bridge since we were young, and it is not hard to see, using the benefit of hindsight, the meaninglessness and aimlessness of the romantic exploits and attempted flirtations as depicted in the first half of the movie. No one in the world can succeed in injecting sense into the head of these teenagers. Very often, they themselves don’t know why they are doing what they are doing. There is neither any clarity nor sense of purpose in their actions. It is so, at least in the case of the youth portrayed in the film. So, if that part of the film lacks clarity, as Mr.Mohan accuses it of, I would like to believe, although I don’t want to talk about Premam and Waiting for Godot in the same breath, that it is because content and form has become inseparable, in the case of Premam.

Epilogue: Whatever be your profession, it is not necessary to always tread the beaten path or always use the tested formulae. It is when you think out of the box that you can come up with spectacular game changing ideas. I have found that many software project managers find it tiresome to deal with aged members of their client organizations. The ‘senior citizens’ have no inkling of what a software can do or cannot do; to them it is a magic lantern which can deliver the impossible. Now, to me, that is what a good software company should be aiming to do: “deliver the impossible”! But the minds of the techies in the IT team and those of the tech-savvy in the client’s team are conditioned to think along what they already know about the software, and hence their thought processes are severely constrained. That is why I have always held that those who are absolutely not tech savvy should be part of the teams that do the ‘Requirements gathering’ for an IT project. Only they can irritate you with their seemingly absurd demands. But who knows, one such absurd, illogical, infeasible demand might prompt you to come up with the next big thing in the market! (Well, it is not that ignorance is a pre-requisite for you to come up with innovative ideas though).