Someone once told me the most important thing that one needs to have is empathy. No matter what ideologies one chooses to adhere to, no matter their occupation, one must be empathic. That is the fundamental of being a good person. I believe she was right. Being able to put yourself in someone else's shoes, and trying to view the world from someone else's perspective is certainly not an easy task. Sometimes it might appear to be impossible. Yet adopting the mindset to try to figure out where other people are coming from is within our reach. And once we learn to be empathic many dilemmas seem to get resolved. Because now we have a reason, to be honest with ourselves and others and to do the right thing.
Watching good movies has made me more empathic than I was before. Why?
How many people do we know personally? And what socio-economic classes do they belong to? To the extent of my knowledge, most of the people that we know and almost everyone we have a close connection with belong to the same socio-economic class as we do, they believe in the same god and their ballot goes to the same symbol as ours. No surprise that their lives are not so different from ours. We are extremely familiar with their ambitions, hopes, insecurities and the sources that bring them joy and sorrow. We understand life as it is inside our bubble. While we struggle quite a bit to make sense of life outside. Therefore, life outside of this perimeter tends to appear black and white. Not too sophisticated or vivid. A drug dealer is a scum for society, a murderer is some freak without any sense of morality, all women are gold diggers and all men are perverts. The west is a utopia and mosques breed terrorists.
Not all of us believe all of it but most of us believe in some myths. Our myopic vision doesn't know any better. While our newsfeed, tong addas, friends and family are constantly telling us the same lies repeatedly. In a world as such Darren Aronofsky could be a great myth-buster for us. Or Satyajit or Wong Kar-wai. One "Requiem For A Dream" may make you feel sympathy rather than disgust for drug addicts, one "Shawshank Redemption" may make you question retribution, and one "Nagarkirtan" may change your perception of "Hijras". While one "Eternal Sunshine" can make you grieve for a lost love, a "Chungking Express" might make you want to fall in love again. But overall good cinema is always entertaining. Many good films might not be your type but there are thousands of films that you will love to watch. And that's the catch. We might not want to have an hour-long conversation with a loner who wants to get far away from the city and live in a bus deep inside a forest but we are going to enjoy "Into The Wild." Because we love cinema.