Total perspective vortex: A bibliography

The Total Perspective Vortex in Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a device capable of extrapolating a complete picture of the universe – every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition and their economic and social history from one small piece of fairy cake.  It is a torture device. The torturer, if she or he so wishes, can plug on one end, the whole of reality as extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake, and the victim can then be plugged into the other end: so that when turned on, the victim sees, in one instant, the whole infinity of creation and their self in relation to it. The experience paralyses or even kills the victim.

Let’s attempt at putting ourselves through a very, very weak version of this device. Because nobody has tried to build these amazing devices born of Adams’ genius, we’ll have to rely on a mix of books and videos.

We can start with watching the powerful short ‘Powers of Ten’ by Charles and Ray Eames. The architect couple, famous makers of wonderful objects like the Eames chair, made this film in 1968 (releasing it in 1977), by far predating Google Maps and The Pale Blue Dot. Starting at a picnic by a lakeside, the video takes us on a quick ride to the outer edges of the universe, and then, back again, deep into the human DNA and the atoms that inform its construction. Once we have established our insignificance in spatial terms, let’s go down a temporal tunnel.

“The cosmos is also within us. We're made of star stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.” One of the most enlightening books that will put things in perspective for us would be Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, with its insistence that “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” Let’s get on with it, then.

In an approximately 13.8 billion year old universe, our little blue rock formed around 4.6 billion (4600 million) years ago. Protons fused together in stars and new elements formed. The rich diversity of elements on earth created a possibility of millions of molecular permutations. Hydrogen reacted with carbon dioxide inside iron-sulphur bubbles, forming organic molecules like acetate, and a few hundred million years of accumulated reactions later, there were enough complex organic molecules replicating themselves. RNA and DNA evolved, and natural selection kicked in (to understand the principles of natural selection and evolution, read the very brilliantly put together ‘Introducing Evolution: A Graphic Guide’ by Dylan Evans).

Photosynthesis evolved about 3 billion years ago, simple animals about 600 million years ago, the homo-genus appeared around 2.5 million years ago, and homo sapiens started emerging 200,000 ago. It’s been only 25,000 years since the Neanderthals died out and the human being with behaviour traits similar to us today, became prevalent. Play with some evolution timelines online and let the idea of our infancy as a species sink in. I would recommend going to andabien.com, johnkyrk.com and bighistoryproject.com. My personal favourite is www.eoht.info/page/Evolution+timeline (also look up the Human Molecule, while at it).

An obvious choice, at this point, would be to dive into Bill Bryson’s greatly entertaining A Short History of Nearly Everything, but a more poetic place to go to, would be ‘The Lives of a Cell’ by Lewis Thomas - especially for its precious consolation that “There are some creatures that do not seem to die at all; they simply vanish totally into their own progeny. Single cells do this. The cell becomes two, then four, and so on, and after a while the last trace is gone. It cannot be seen as death; barring mutation, the descendants are simply the first cell, living all over again.”

Back on our timeline: it’s been about 12,000 years since the invention of agriculture in the ancient near east (roughly modern day middle east), and like all exponential consequences of accumulating reactions, this bibliography is going to explode, as well. The first thesis here, is Jared Diamond’s argument of environmental determinism, “History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples' environments”, in the perfectly reasoned, (but also disappointingly Eurocentric) ‘Guns, Germs and Steel’. You could skip the book and watch the documentary instead, as with the mildly amusing ‘The Botany of Desire’ by Michael Pollan. Now, the subtle co-evolution of language, technology and the human brain, is best studied with the neuroscientists - it would be worthwhile to browse through Terry Deacon’s ‘The Symbolic Species’. Yet, the real fun begins with binging on V S Ramachandran’s absolutely incredible talks, but wait, we are skipping a step.

Why do we feel fear, joy, anger, disgust, excitement or disdain? Why do we behave the way we do? Charles Darwin in ‘The Origin of the Species’, and his following works, made the first connection between natural selection and behavior patterns. Yet, it took another century for evolutionary thinking to become the basis of studies in animal and human behaviour, and, consequently, of human interaction, relationships and society - and no book does it better than Richard Dawkins’ seminal ‘The Selfish Gene’, a masterpiece of piercing clarity and scientific reasoning, evolving the field of semiotics into memetics.

To finally counter the nihilism of this adventure, read the prophetic ‘The Last Question’ by Isaac Asimov. And if you are sufficiently inspired by Asimov's transhumanism, have a go at Kurzweil's claim that ‘Singularity is Near’.

Why do I do what I do? My INK Talk...

An appeal...

(Disclaimer: This post is only an emotional appeal. It does not welcome any party propaganda, so political rhetoric will be deleted. Share, if you care.)

Just one final appeal to everybody to make a truly informed decision. Your vote will count, even if you think it's one against a million, because you never know what is truly burning in the heart of your fellow citizens, till you honestly, deeply engage.

All of us want a fairer, nicer and cleaner, a more progressive and a more civilised country with better and equal opportunities for all. We want to uphold our right to speak and ask questions. We want to retain our right to seek information and justice. We want our natural resources to be mined and used for a better and sustainable life, while remembering they are borrowed from our future generations, and are not to be sold off to political sponsors.

We don't want to see criminals representing us in the parliament - we want to rehabilitate them, and engage them in social responsibility, help them readjust their worldview. The same goes for the corrupt - they, like us, are victims of a corroded machinery - we want to help build better systems. We want representatives who welcome our participation in policy thinking, and not decimate it. We want a government that is not hard of hearing, and educates and empowers communities to participate in short term practical decisions like road repair and water supply and annual local fund allocations for building schools and parks - and while at it, we want our representatives to do everything in their power to protect our fundamental, inalienable rights as living beings.

Let's remember that we are not working against each other. Let's work against this constant, convenient manufacturing of the "other", and let's work towards cleaning the mess we have created or inherited, together. And let's look at the Preamble to the Indian Constitution one last time, before we cast our vote -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preamble_to_the_Constitution_of_India

The Facebook mirror post is here - 

https://www.facebook.com/recyclewala/posts/10152138513412621

Proposition for a Revolution.

When Khushboo and Vinay decided to track the evolution of the Aam Aadmi Party, none of us knew what that document is going to look like. Because of the party's stand on transparency, it wasn't difficult to get access early on (another reason was, perhaps, they were glad there was at least some video record of their journey.) Today, we are in the process of editing a documentary feature, which we feel, is a really relevant icebreaker to many conversations we need to have - about our democratic processes, policies, practices and possibilities. We have maintained a high degree of rigor in our observation and documentation, and worked hard towards an objective, academic and unbiased perspective. We are very glad to invite the community to participate in the making and the eventual distribution of the film. Please watch the trailer of the film here (and share, if it resonates with you - with the hashtag #Prop4Rev) -

prop4rev.com

There is no free will, but you have a choice! (And the role of memes in choice-creation)

(This is the rough draft of the piece that became my INK Talk. It's more of a roughly summed up summary of the book I am currently writing. I have shared many inferences, without having enough space to elucidate on their logical proofs. Also, given the time and space constraint, I have not sufficiently established the relationship between culture and choice-expansion, but merely hinted at it. With my book, I also intend to spend a considerable amount of time deconstructing the memeplex of religious and political institutions, which again I have only cursorily hinted at here. Finally, one of the arguments made here is actually a simple observation that the existence of choice or the possibility to choose between existing choices is not in contradiction with determinism.)

"Free Will" by Nitin Zihani Chowdhary

As a filmmaker, I feel my job has many functions – to archive, to assess, to examine, to inquire, to challenge, to propose, to simulate, to stimulate, even hope to inspire, to analyse, to reject downright, to synthesise, aspire to be enlightened and share it, to interpret new data, to assimilate the most significant breakthroughs in our thinking and knowing into metaphors, analogies and narratives that domesticate the wild physics of the Higgs Boson particle and reconstruct time capsules so they are easier to swallow.

There are a few certainties. That’s good. That’s good to work with. One, we are all going to die. (Well, some of us might go on, if Kurzweil and some others have their way, but that’s going to take a while, so even if they are, most of us are going to die.) That sucks, but there’s something that sucks even more - Life is not teleological. That is, it did not evolve with a predetermined purpose (In a deleted conversation from Ship of Theseus, Cārvāka jokingly espouses the contrary view that the earth sprouted life to evolve into human beings, who can further construct technology to colonise other planets). Matter simmered in the boiling pot of the planet, hit by lightning and UV radiation for billions of years, passing through a godzillion reactions and their accumulated residue, leading to us. All meaning is an accumulation. All purpose must be invented.

Now, here’s my problem – I have been able to articulate it somewhat through a character in my film. The monk Maitreya says at one point “I guess we agree with reason, but now it’s a matter of disposition.” I agree with the nihilists and causal determinists completely, but my emotional makeup is that of a romantic, so what can I do about it? I thought I could put myself at the service of one of the many aspirations of life – and that is a proliferation of choices. An expansion of the scope of what's possible for an organism to do. As life evolves, memory systems and their interlinking co-evolve, helping the organism make more choices. So, I choose, or rather the cumulative decision making agency that is me, chooses to work in the field of memory, simulation and most importantly, meme-creation. For it’s ideas, metaphors, memes and memeplexes that shape our choices profoundly.

Aye, there's the rub. For in that sweep of determinism, what memes may come? If the parts are guided by laws of determinism and causality, how can the whole exhibit any freedom? It's of some significance that these parts themselves are wholes, that further have parts that are not guided by laws of strict causal determinism, but follow the freedom of quantum probability. But I am getting ahead of myself. Can the whole exhibit freedom, when the parts don't seem to? Something tells us, it does. We empirically experience choice. We experience impulse, emotion, reason, dilemma, ambivalence, conflict, and the relief of making the choice. Is it an illusion then? How could the whole be greater than the some of its parts? The answer seemed simple. There is the sum of all the parts, and there is the sum of all the interactions and relationships between the parts, there is also a sum of all the interactions with the environment of the parts, and the whole is a total of all these sums. That seems to me, to be the recipe for wonder, for consciousness, for free choice. When the parts stop interacting with each other, the sum stays, but the whole vanishes. And that is a dead parrot!

The human being is made of trillions of cells, and there are about ten times more bacteria in the human body than “human” cells. In the past centuries we thought of ourselves as monolithic entities, but now we know, we are entire ecosystems. So let’s take a whole, a hundred trillionth of a human being. A bacterium swimming smoothly in water – now let’s introduce a drop of acid in its environment. A mere contact with a single molecule of a fatal substance and it will tumble around and speed in the other direction. If we were to logically break down the steps between the contact and the action of tumbling, then we get – stimulus, contact / perception, reference to memory – in this case, a genetic memory of thirty six chemicals, recognition, inference, recall of response and finally, action / response. A simple if-then program that itself would have taken billions of generations to evolve (along with it's next consequential step - the dangling else) . This, understandably has happened through completely physical, causal “unconscious” processes.

What I can’t help but suggest is an approach of looking – that biology causes a substance interference in physical laws – by pitching one against the other. This is what I mean by that statement – if a micro-body that was a chemical imitation of the bacterium, were to come in contact with the molecule of acid, it would not be repelled by it. It would be engulfed, without resistance (much like a chemical equivalent of a bird will not rise against gravity and fly). So I am rephrasing choice as the possibility of tumbling – the possibility for the bacterium to not be engulfed by the fatal substance in its environment. So, while the laws that led to this simple if-then decision making system are deterministic, a choice is created by the very existence of the decision making process.

As life evolves into more complex forms, one more step gets introduced in this process – this step is learning – storage of new data, acquired within the lifetime of the organism. Memory evolved to supply useful information to the organism’s decision-making systems, so they can change their behavior to better suit their environment, or even predict the future based on patterns of the past. But memory itself is a metaphor, it’s a snapshot of reality. An intricate system of these snapshots acquired over a lifetime provide new updated information to life’s decision making agency, sometimes contradictory to the memory genetically inherited - causing conflicts between intuition and reason, the classical “heart” and the “mind”. 

Evolution of technology - either biological or human-created is exponential, but the timelines are drastically different. Life (bio-technology) evolves on a timeline of hundreds of millions of years, while technology produced by human beings (by technology here, I mean all forms of technologies - social, political, institutional, cultural, mechanical, digital, etc.) evolves on timeline of mere centuries and decades (and soon, mere weeks). Those alive today are both anatomically and neurologically similar to those around, say, twenty thousand years ago. The environments, however, have gone through radical shifts. One is likely to encounter more people in a mall or an airport than an ancestor did in an entire lifetime. Emotions are appeal systems (response recommendations), evolved over billions of years of experiences, that can be largely understood as two kinds of appeals - incentivising like joy, happiness, excitement, and warning appeals like jealousy, sorrow, anger, etc. Impulses and emotions that evolved in the forest and savanna environments could be found to be misguided in post-agrarian societies, while many more could be argued to be increasingly vestigial, and in many cases, socially detrimental. This vast magnitude of variables cause conflicts, contradictions and dilemmas.

To better understand the nature of information density in memories and memes, let’s take the famous case study by the nobel winning ethologist Tinbergen, (subsequently cleaned up recently by Ten Cate, reconfirming the inferences of the original experiment). Within an hour of emerging from its shell, a Herring seagull chick finds its mother’s large yellow beak (with a big red dot on it) and begins pecking. It is then that the mother feeds it. Tinbergen presented a seagull chick with a disembodied beak of an adult Herring gull. The chick still pecked at the beak, hoping to be fed by it. Tinbergen had discovered the essential properties, or the recipe, for a beak that tells a chick what to peck at: high visual contrast (between the dot and the base colour of the beak), rectangular elongation and thinness, and the color red (that was replaceable with dots of other colours, as long as the contrast was maintained. The red dot, however yielded maximum interest). So he took a long stick, painted it red, and showed it to the chicks. They excitedly pecked at it. Then he added three white lines to the bottom, to enhance the contrast, and he reduced the thickness by half. When he showed this object to the chicks, they went absolutely insane, pecking in every direction as quickly as they could. Dumbs chicks, eh? Does it remind us of any of our obsessive behaviours? The way we respond, perhaps, to oil in our food, to sex and violence in our cinema, to the promise of eternal survival in the religions?

The results of this experiment have been interpreted in many ways, and have informed us profoundly about the nature of perception, memory and response. I am extrapolating a particular association from the results - That there is clearly an evolutionary function of maximising information density in small units. Information is resource expensive and biological technology precedes digital technology in this optimisation - maximising the experiences and inferences that can be contained in smaller and smaller units of memory. It's resource wise to save the information of the unique part to recognize the whole - It's resource wise for the Herring gull to store the information of the unique beak to recognise the entire bird, as the chances of an ethologist playing a disembodied beak prank in its natural environment are zero. This content-resource optimisation is the prime causal force behind the phenomenon of super-stimuli. There are many recipes to achieve this distillation - reduction, isolation (a synecdoche of a unique part representing the whole), grouping, exaggeration, imitation and condensing vast amounts of information into codes.

A recurrent aspiration, and one of the many common aspirations at that, of all intellectual endeavor – of arts and sciences – is the maximization of content density per unit. A piece of literature is great when there is a high density of experiences contained in a few passages, a photograph great, when it transcends the mere documentation of the moment it's capturing, a scientific equation great, when many other inferences are contained within it... (The information of the entire organism itself comes from a single genome).

One of my favourite parables is that of the cartographer. The emperor of the kingdom summons the great cartographer to chart a map of the kingdom. The cartographer sets upon the supertask and starts making a most intricate map. When the map is finally made, the women and men of the kingdom gather at the public hall to witness it. Some are enlightened, some awed, some confused, and some criticize the map to be fallacious or inadequate. It doesn’t begin to do any justice to the vast, rich complexity of the kingdom, some feel. The cartographer is even more aware of the shortcomings of her own map. She builds another map, this time far bigger, comprehensive, three dimensional, with miniature automata, with interactive parts and environments, replete with fountains for streams, mounds for mountains... builds towers for people to go up to, and get a bird’s eye view of their universe - a total perspective vortex. People realise their insignificance in the larger scheme of things. Family feuds end, disagreements settle, some leave the kingdom in search of meaning, some turn to science, some to religion, and a few suicides occur. But the cartographer is still unamused... She keeps building a map, more and more intricate, bigger and bigger... till the time the map replaces the kingdom, itself.

How much of the territory can truly be represented by the map? How much information can be packed into one small unit of culture? How large would the map be if it had to be really, really accurate? Can it be read without a legend? A really dense map with a huge variety of symbols will require an elaborate legend, a map for the map.  

And then there are maps of maps of maps, each level aiming towards further distillation. An equation like e = mc2 will be meaningless without a decoding legend. If Munch's “The Scream” was a dense map of experience, response, mood and context, but one had never come across it, then a Matt Groening joke on it will be lost on that person, much like this allusion will be lost on those in the audience, who have never seen an episode of the Simpsons.

I want to examine the role of information packaged in memes in the expansion of the scope of choices. More experience means more foreknowledge, more foreknowledge means an increased capability to calculate and choose accordingly for the decision-making agency. Lifetime of experiences and inferences (true or fallacious, benign or detrimental) can be packaged in capsule sized units of culture, highly condensed, easily transported, and generations have to learn only the decoding systems.

(One of the most thriving memes of known history is the idea of transcendence - God, soul, heaven, after-life, immortality, even martyrdom. We find ourselves pecking at this shtick with the insane obsession of the Herring gull chick. The promise of survival beyond individual death or dispersion appeals to the most primal driving force of existence. Promises of transcendence have evolved out of the thriving desire to ward off the inevitable threat of individual death. Most systems propose a more or less perfect immortality – one where memories, hopes, desires, knowledge and even experiences survive the death of the physical body. An engagement and acceptance of this meme makes death particularly irrelevant. The upholding of the promise at the cost of individual sacrifice becomes acceptable. Individual sacrifices even become necessary in validating the promise.)

If there are a trillion trillion parts in the equation, a trillion trillion variables, and their near infinite permutations and interactions, a vast scope of probability emerges - that can be decided for and against, all evolved out of causal deterministic forces yes, but allowing for very, very real choices. We can rephrase Cogito ergo sum, to "I think I choose, therefore I choose". The I that did not choose to be here, just happened to have arose from a really competitive sperm, born into situations, not chosen either. But the scope of choice expands for some of us, and can be expanded for everyone, if we understand the significance of technological evolution in choice-proliferation. That’s what we do, when we travel, learn, eat, make love, hoard up, give up, read stories, watch films, sign into social contracts, choose political or philosophical affiliations … we protect and expand the choices.

I left the title of my talk a bit incomplete for a bumper sticker effect (or rather a cheap play of syntax). It should have been “There is no free will, but you have a choice – well, some of you, some of the time.” 

Long note - updated

I have spoken, at length, about the reasons why I usually decide to develop one idea over another – I chew on a philosophical problem for a long time, keeping it in a mental register till I arrive at a narrative metaphor best suited for resolving it. When I am able to come up with a narrative idea that seems to be in continuum with a philosophical conundrum I have had, it simply “clicks”. If I find out even a moment or a scene I am considering to narrate having been already done in some other film, I immediately replace it with another solution. 

I have spoken in several interviews about the genesis of some of the ideas in Ship of Theseus. It will take more than a few hundred pages to talk about its entire etymology, so I won’t attempt that here. I will cursorily speak about the evolution of just one narrative strand.

In the year 2005, as Khushboo and I were making our featurette length short film Continuum, we had started developing a magical-realist, urbsurd and a plenitudinous world of a blind hockey player. There were several magical worlds and characters that surrounded her (like a jeannie, who has lost his memory, a covert activist of a hero, etc.). Like many Hungarian masters, we were aspiring to use sport as a laboratory human experiment. Only, in our case, this socio-political allegory was to trigger off a dialogue on (and marginally in favour of) social anarchism.

The character of our story played in hockey tournaments for the visually impaired, for a team that invariably always lost. The central conceit of the plot was to follow her through a vacation, carefully avoiding central action points, only to return to the field with her – this time winning game after game for her team. The audience is invited to solve this (rather easy to decipher) enigma. What happened on the vacation? It turns out, not as a grand point of reveal, but as a completely understated easy-to-miss disclosure, that she had a cornea transplant. (One absurdly kitsch joke that Khushboo liked to crack about the character was in the form of a dialogue between her and her lover when they first meet. “Tumhari aankhen bahot khoobsurat hai.” “Thank you, par meri nahin hain.”)

A social phenomenon that we were attracted to was that of anonymous groups – complete strangers providing solace, understanding and advice to each other based on one common (often traumatic) experience (or malady). We made our protagonist, the blind hockey player, a participant in an anonymous group. But what could possibly be binding them? We had heard about alien abductee anonymous – fascinating, but obviously so. We thought of one thing that binds them all (won’t give spoilers here) and suddenly realized that this narrative idea is a great metaphor for micro-level (cell and bacteria) replacement problem we had wanted to resolve.

This clicked! As we progressed in the story, there were obvious places to go to, and we let ourselves go there – post-surgery readjustment issues. We thought we would play with the trope, and see if we can reinvent it somehow. As we delved further in our story, we increasingly found ourselves migrating further and further towards the anonymous group. We were suddenly curious about all the other members. Who were these people? What organs had they received? What were their post-surgery readjustment issues?

This had opened up a fascinating world for us to explore. We dropped the jeannie and the activist altogether. We knew that all our narratives now meet in the anonymous group. We wrote a funny scene - in one of their meetings, they decide to name themselves. This was the beginning of Ship of Theseus.

The two major plot points – sight restoration and post-surgery readjustment issues were already present in our story about the blind hockey player. Now the second part of this note, is a bullet – I will elaborate upon it later, as well –

I have spoken at length about how my DoP Pankaj Kumar urged me to look at the life and work of the celebrated Slowenian visually impaired photographer Evgen Bavcar, with the hope of diverting my attention from the character of the blind hockey player, to the world of blind photographers. I was reluctant initially at engaging with, what I felt, was a slightly "sensational irony", given the intensely oxymoronic nature of its central conceit. I also felt that there is a sense of a tokenist novelty here - while it's a surprisingly common identity - there are thousands of visually impaired artists in the world - the desire to capture the experience in an external visual "memory box" is clearly understandable. Having once decided to engage with it, we decided to dive as deep as we possibly could into it.

Once you have a blind protagonist in your film, how do you fight the cliché of the restored eyesight? I decided I won’t. So the challenge in front of me was to take up the work of Evgan Bavcar, go along with the tropes of sight restoration and post surgery conflict – use it as a narrative layer for all the questions I wanted to explore about art and the subjective experience of beauty.  

I have spoken about my references at length - about Daniel Kisch and Ben Underwood, the two visually impaired men with a highly evolved faculty of echolocation. I have spoken about the ideas of echolocation that I learnt from the work of evolutionary biologists (especially the chapter on echolocation in The Blind Watchmaker), and how I have tried trigger that dialogue through the film. I have spoken about the photorapher’s aspiration of condensification and the aspiration of all artists to achieve maximum content density per unit of art, and how that informs the work of the blind photographer in my film. I have spoken at length about the idea of accident vs intent, the intention of simulation and metaphor in photography (a deleted scene that was shown in an early trailer starts with a quote from Jean Baudrillard), and the possibility of arriving at an objective scale of measuring beauty, and its relation to the work of neuroaestheticists like V S Ramachandran and Semir Zeki. A small capsule of our research work with a Mumbai based blind photographer Mahesh Umrrania has been made available online.

For the work and the process of blind photographers, we drew heavily from Pete Eckert and the Sight Unseen collective of visually impaired photographers in California (the light-painting photographs that Aliya takes in the film are inspired from Eckert’s processes.)

And for those interested in finding more about the post-surgery readjustment problems, I recommend they have a look at my real original reference – the essay titled “To See or Not to See” by the neurologist Oliver Sacks in his book “An Anthropologist on Mars”.

Thank you, everyone, for the intense curiosity and the interest.

Ship of Theseus - share this post!

Together, we have proven a point - that Indian audiences are not only ready for, but directly demanding insight, invention, beauty and meaning in their cinema. The need for a robust cultural environment has been vocalised at the box office. It's loud and clear, and has forced a valid response - an expansion of the film's release to more cities. The wall of presumption has been dented, now it needs to come down. Let's not accept anything lesser.

Thanks to you, the film will now release in seventeen new cities next Friday (Surat, Goa, Rajkot, Mangalore, Mysore, Chandigarh, Lucknow, Bhopal, Indore, Nagpur, Raipur, Vizag, Coimbatore, Patna, Jaipur, Trivandrum and Calicut, in addition to the existing nine cities). We need to put in our best to keep this dialogue alive. This is about the survival and growth of all that is relevant to us, culturally.

We are more than just a film now. We don't know if this is going to be seen, in retrospect, as a small step or a giant leap. We do know that this would be seen as an opportunity for a movement - either taken or missed.

We need to come together to evolve a new ecosystem for profound, complex, meaningful, relevant, rigorous, experimenting, inquiring and beautiful cinema to exist and be accessible to each one of us - a privilege we don’t have yet. We can't afford hoardings or TV spots (the ones we have, were offered for free). We will depend on you to carry this further.

If the film has resonated with you, or held any meaning for you, then we request you to volunteer (especially, if you live in any of the cities the film is releasing in).

Here's what you can do to partake in, what we naively, ambitiously hope would be, a cinema resurgence in urban India -

- Make Ship of Theseus banner the Cover Photo on your Facebook profile.

- Share Ship of Theseus related content (reviews, posters, trailers, interviews, quotes from the film) on your Facebook personal profile, as well as the Facebook groups you are a part of.

- If you or any of your friends manage a Facebook Page, get Ship of Theseus trailer shared through that page.

- Change your twitter handle to Ship of

- Regularly RT tweets from @sotfilm and share posts from facebook.com/sotfilm

- E-mail the film's trailer, social media links and show timings to everyone you think would be interested in the film.

- Set your gmail status message with a link to the Ship of Theseus trailer/page.

- If you have a Youtube Channel, place the Ship of Theseus trailer link in the annotations to your videos.

- Share material on your blog - trailers, posters and links. Put up the SOT banner linking it to the FB page.

- Initiate discussions around the film in the online forums you are part of.

- Embed Ship of Theseus trailer on your blogs, websites, articles.

- Gift a screening of the film to someone you feel should watch the film.

- Organise group screenings of the film, followed by post screening discussions. You can shoot the video of the discussion, and we'll share it online.

- Call at least one person you know, who hasn't yet seen the film, and tell them about it, if it's not an intrusion.

- Innovate & improvise!

- Share this post!


Here are some relevant links -

Get images you can share from
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10151677518312621.1073741827.562167620&type=1&l=e450dbe4bd

Official trailer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5xt0cKasDw

The atheist prayer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMvNfytKRBQ

Recommendation video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zCupteBlBo

Dialogue promos
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAtua8-nRRU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjnAn11HdIY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3U03OM8DMo

Some early teasers
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5JW92zk32s
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRMvms9Z9Cs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uaVRIoc8buM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPslufWdlMw

Our early short films and other work at -
http://www.youtube.com/recyclewala

Some third party content about us
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=320L6meovVE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYRXlo1BODA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-2NtMakk5o
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GApzllA7f5w
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2QSOhwgjNU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRaMa-LJKto
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkyJNapi7Nk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTi4AXpYH9g