Marvellous (2014): Movie Review

Marvellous is a 2014 British Tele film capturing the life of Neil Baldwin who had served as kitman in the legendary Stoke City Football Club in the 1990s. At the outset, one ought to know that this movie is not about football. It is about Neil Baldwin, who, inspite of his learning difficulties, ends up playing football for Stoke City in a testimonial match.

What makes it a remarkable and outstanding movie is Peter Bowker's powerful script. Toby Jones has played the role of Neil Baldwin with great accuracy. Other noteworthy and outstanding point of the movie is that Neil Baldwin himself makes cameo appearances, showing up in between. 

Marvellous is a very optimistic movie which will make you feel good. In a scale of 10 we give it a 9.5.

The Grand Budapest Hotel- Movie Review

THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL

The Grand Budapest Hotel is a Wes Anderson film and like all his films, this movie too has the distinctly recognisable style both in special effects, dialogues and those who have watched his 2012 movie The Moonrise Kingdom will without effort recognise the Anderson hand capturing every minute detail in the meticulously designed sets.

Set up in the period between the two wars in Europe, it is the story where our lead character, the concierge of the hotel, Gustave H played by Ralph Fiennes gets involved in the murder of a wealthy lady and the chemistry between the concierge and his protege, Zero played by Tony Revolori and the related adventure in which the duo must clear Gustave's name.

It is one of the best movies of 2014 and each character comes so real with great intensity.

In a scale of 10 we give it a 9.5. A must watch. 

Ten Best Books of 2014: Must Read

The following books are the best of the year 2014 in their own way and also across different genres, and the order in which they appear has nothing to do with  rating- all are equally fascinating

FICTION

NON-FICTION

FINANCE

COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY

HISTORY

FINANCIAL CRISIS

HUMOUR & KIDS

The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert: Book Review.

The Signature of All Things is the story of Alma Whitaker, born in 1800 in Philadelphia in the family of one of the richest men in the US, who had built a fortune dealing in import-export  of exotic plants all over the globe. The novel pans across Alma’s early childhood through her youth to her very last days. As an only child in the family and exposed to botanical details and erudite gatherings from her infant time, Alma travels through the 500 page book searching for knowledge and love. The plot twists and turns around her interest in botany, secret erotic needs, an adopted sister, a reserved life where emotional expressions were forbidden and an unrequited love.  The story of sacrifice and three disturbed lives following a failed three way love unfolds following the death of her father in her early 50s which drives her  across the ocean to Tahiti and then Holland till she eventually finds peace with her unpublished book in a Botanical Institute owned by her maternal grand parents.

An engaging book on self discovery, this is a brilliant work by Elizabeth Gilbert and is definitely a leisure read. We give it 7.5 in a scale of 10.

J by Howard Jacobson: Book Review

A catastrophe has broken out in the past which has somehow transformed the society and culture.  With that in the background in a distant memory, the novel begins when the lead characters, Kevern Cohen, a young paranoid male and Ailinn Solomons, a young female from the orphanage and adopted later, meet each other and fall in love. The story is like driving in an unknown territory in a dense fog with no clues as to where or to what the author is driving. The story progresses slowly with melodramatic and emotional reactions of the couple with a few references to the forefathers of Kevern Cohen. Sometimes the author narrates through the eyes of a professor who vacillates between like and dislike for the couple. And then there at the heart of the plot is Esme Nussbaum who is seeing the chinks and faulted lines in the new world.

The story becomes more and more intriguing as it is revealed that it was not a mere coincidence that the couple met, that there are forces that throw the two into each other’s arms.

Such is the brilliance of the author Howard Jacobson that at times you will feel like shelving the book without finishing it but you will read it to the end and once you have finished reading it you will want to read it again.

In a scale of 10 we give it 8.5, a must read book which was short-listed for the Man- Booker Prize of 2014.

The Hidden Enemy Part VI: Ego & Meditation

Continued from Part V 
The Sages of Ancient India, after years and years of meditation found out that Ego is nothing but one’s image on oneself or in simple words what one thinks one is. They established that the birth of Ego was the result of living in society. It is the by product of interaction with people. It is born when people around us start telling us what they think we are, directly through words and indirectly through their behaviour towards us, i.e. how they treat us. It may however be noted that we too are doing the same thing to others through our speech and behaviour. We too are contributing in creation of Ego in others.

The Ego comes into force only when you see a person and then as you grow up, even when you might be alone with no one around, Ego still remains there because now people have entered your thoughts. Every thought passing or hovering in your mind is always with respect to someone or the other. Ego has now become a permanent force within you. You have now reached a state where a people less universe seems meaningless to you, where you think that everything is only about people, everything is people centric and thus you lose all the connection you had initially with reality. People mean the world to you and it is only about people or with respect to people that you can think.

The individual as a consequence is launched into a spiralling trap in which the Ego grows within and soon usurps the self and assumes full command. We no longer behave rationally and are always doing our level best to be as irrational and stupid as we can be and as a consequence, we are constantly hurting ourselves and placing ourselves in a state of quandary ending up feeling miserable. The most surprising thing is that we never realise that we are putting ourselves in the hands of misfortune and are always looking out into the world to blame something or the other for our state of misery. But blaming has never yielded results. It has only been substantial in strengthening Ego.

The life becomes full of sorrow, misery, grief compelling the individual to be restless, impatient and attracted towards the useless things in the world, running about arbitrarily and randomly and always driven by mood swings. They concluded that this is what the Ego does once it has assumed full command over the individual.

They likened Ego to the mythical ghost that enters inside one’s body and possesses the individual taking full command and control of the individual. It is no doubt that Ego is in itself a false apparition just like a ghost and controls the brain.

The Sages of Ancient India asserted that unless and until one rids oneself of this deep malaise one has got oneself into, one cannot live life the way nature had intended one to live it and the purpose of life will never be known to the individual who dies struggling.

They insisted that it is the prime responsibility of every individual to first rid oneself of the Ego before all else for without getting rid of the false apparition which has taken over, the life will be full of troubles and tragedies.                                                             

The first step in this direction starts with realisation that all our sufferings are coming from the Ego that is well entrenched within us. We should see that it is the centre that commands us and that we are now ruled by the Ego and not by our self. We should realise that the source of all our miseries is the Ego within us. The image of ourselves on us is the real trouble maker.

The process of realisation starts with meditation. To meditate simply means to think. You just have to sit in a peaceful place in a posture in which you feel comfortable and close your eyes. Once you start meditating, various thoughts will cross your mind. All you have to do is just ignore those thoughts and try to look within for the source of your sufferings, your miseries and your misfortunes. You will see how your self-image has made a simple life so complicated for you.

It is advisable that you should meditate for an hour each in the morning and in the evening and also when you are not meditating, you should retain this thought throughout the day about the hidden enemy within. Every time you will feel bad or miserable in the day, you should close your eyes for a few moments and again try to locate the source of misery within you.
It will help if you start your meditation with a silent prayer that the source of all your miseries is your Ego and that you want to get rid of it.

After being continuously vigilant of your sufferings and miseries and carefully locating the sources tracing them to the Ego, you will eventually internalise this realisation that your self-image is the culprit and by and by you will see your true self emerge and take over.

                                        ......  To be concluded

The Wondrous Youth

The Wondrous Youth

We walked
In the town of our youth 

In endless circumambulations

On the periphery of the lake
Watching its shades
Changing colours 
From silvery to blue
From green to asphalt

From dawn to dusk

For as long as

The lights allowed.

There were

Many a walking breaks

Hither & thither

While shaking hands

Failing yet again

In conjuring a witty

Humorous and piquant

Original reply to every

How are you

Where have you been

How was your day

Or a long time no see

Greeting

Those known faces

But not known

Otherwise

To where they lived

Who they were

How they lived.

Sometimes chancing upon

The self made elders

Patting keep it ups

Love your attitude

On the lucky achievers

And to the timorous

Struggling within like me

Slapping innuendos

In quivering smile

In disparaging

Sympathy of lost hope.

And the occasional breaks

At tea and coffee joints

Listening to

Who thought what
And fiery debates

On news articles

On movies

On politics of war
On love of fashion

On the decreasing

Standards and values

Reaching dead end

Stifling yawn

And we move out

Some of us

To The Billiards Room

The Club, The Library.

And rest of us

Looking for someone to love

Who'd love back

The same way

As we thought we’d love

For the beauty that

Walked the grace

Of the greyish winter Oaks

Of the auburn autumn maples

In hope to find her

In the evening crowd

With stirred heart storms

Left to be dissolved

Into thin air

Blowing from the lake

Across the years

Across the youth

In the beating

Umbrella-less showers

In the soaked socks

Through the film

Of smouldering smoke

From fallen brown leaves

Crushing below the shoe

Of desolate abandoned walks

Jumping those sprightly steps

Trying to find desperately

 Something to weave through

The dark grey winters

Looking up at stars

That faded too quick

Into shards of emptiness

Wishing to one day

To stumble upon the dream

In a silent promise

To find her

This time round come spring.

                                           poem by Ramakant Pande

The Hidden Enemy Part V: Ego & How It Is Fuelled.

Continued from Part IV

As we have already discussed in the previous articles, ego is just the image of yourself on you through the eyes of the people. It mostly depends on what they have made you feel about yourself. You feel good about yourself when the ego (i.e. whatever you think you are) is confirmed by the people around you through their actions or reactions and that makes you feel happy. Similarly when one feels that the self image is getting invalidated through how people behave with oneself, one gets irritated, sad, miserable and unhappy. You feel bad about yourself. We have also seen that ego starts controlling us as soon as we find someone in vicinity and stealthily people become a part of us by creeping  into our thoughts and generating a vice like grip on them. We lose our connection with reality and true nature and get trapped in society assuming it to be the ultimate truth because the most marvellous gift of nature, the human mind has been usurped by people who are now controlled by how others behave with them. The mind is now limited in its performance and the most beautiful endowment of Mother Nature, the human life is now full of miseries. 

The ego once firmly planted in our mind is constantly growing.

The Sages of Ancient India found out that it grows by feeding on attracting attention.

Whether we accept it or not, whether we realise it happening to us or not, we all are always being compelled by our ego to attract attention by doing or saying whatever we are doing or saying. It works in a very subtle manner and most of us do not see it happening within us (although we always see it happening in others by noticing the way they behave).

We all try to attract attention in some way or the other. We all dress up in a certain way, try to talk intelligently, discuss our tastes, do our best to look beautiful and impress it upon others that we care, that we are polite and kind and that we are so much very like those around us in whatever values are held by them.

When no one pays attention to us we tend to feel down and out and empty. The ego becomes starved and hurt. It propels us to act irrationally and we do the stupidest of conceivable acts.

Most people do not even know how intricately this subtle tendency to attract attention is ingrained in them.

The Ego feeds upon gaining social acceptance, on throwing false impressions upon others, on lying, on the compliments offered by others, on criticizing others, on downsizing others, on show off, on lecturing others, on telling others what is right for them and what is wrong, on complaining, on preaching, on finding fault in others, on giving opinion without being asked to etc.

The Sages of Ancient India also found out that the Ego being false is never comfortable with itself.

Our Ego always knows that no matter what we think we are, our self image is incomplete and is flawed and baseless. If you look around yourself you will see that one constantly regrets what one is. At the same time one also always regrets what one is not. In this process, one always tends to impress upon others and also upon oneself that one is different from what one assumes oneself to be.

In other words our Ego is at constant conflict with itself and makes our minds restless and strained, taking away the natural calm that one is born with and which wanes away with the growth of Ego within us. We come in conflict with others and with ourselves.

                            ... Continued into Part VI

The Hidden Enemy Part IV: Self Consciousness & Ego.

CONTINUED FROM PART - III 

Many thinkers have preferred to call it self- consciousness. Self-consciousness is nothing but the cause of ego and soon after it becomes a habit, the ego takes over on one’s psyche.

Self-consciousness is the chain of thoughts that gets triggered when you are not alone. Soon as you are in the company of another person, when there is someone in your vicinity or in your thoughts, you become aware of yourself. You start seeing yourself through the eyes, the action or the words of the other person or through the way the person has responded to you or behaved with you. You now start thinking, whatever you were thinking taking whoever pops up in your mind into account. You now behave and do things taking into account how the person in your vicinity will take on your action.

It happens to everyone and the neuro-process is so rapid that one barely notices it happening within oneself, let alone accept this fact.

Over a lifetime, self-consciousness, which is a process, or a system of processes in hundreds of thousands of cells, becomes a habit and renders one a slave to this habit, without one’s knowing that it is this habit which has reduced the unlimited capacity of human brain. All the thoughts in your mind are, hereafter, either about people and what they think about you or will say about you or about what you did or have to do while taking all the people you think are involved (or even not involved but related to you) into consideration.

Continued rapid self consciousness helps in formation of ego, which may be likened to a neuro-highway; all thoughts and actions now take this path.

Now it is your ego that starts thinking for you with your logical and rational self relegated into inactivity.

Ego is now your master and you are its slave rendering the unlimited potential of human life into a miserable journey full of suffering and pain.

                                                     ... Continued into Part V

And the Man-Booker Prize for 2014 goes to ...

'The Narrow Road to the Deep North' ,written about war, death, love and evolving as a man from a war hero, by Richard Flanagan bags the prestigious Man-Booker Prize for 2014.

In the grim conditions of a Japanese POW camp on the Thai-Burma death railway, Australian surgeon Dorrigo Evans is haunted by his past indiscretions. As he uses all effort to protect men under his command from starvation, from cholera and a grim life, he receives a letter that will change his life forever. 

Named after a famous Japanese book by the haiku poet Basho, The Narrow Road to the Deep North is described by the 2014 judges as ‘a harrowing account of the cost of war to all who are caught up in it’. Questioning the meaning of heroism, the book explores what motivates acts of extreme cruelty and shows that perpetrators may be as much victims as those they abuse. Flanagan’s father, who died the day he finished The Narrow Road to the Deep North, was a survivor of the Burma Death Railway.

A C Grayling, the philosopher and Chairman, commented that ‘the two great themes from the origin of literature are love and war: this is a magnificent novel of love and war. Written in prose of extraordinary elegance and force, it bridges East and West, past and present, with a story of guilt and heroism.

How To Be Both by Ali Smith: Book Review

How to be both is a book with two different stories which have been interconnected in an abstract way by the brilliant writer, Ali Smith through a fresco painting and use of excellent literary forms. The book has two versions and it is left on chance as to which version the reader lays his/her hands upon.
The version we are reviewing has a modern day teenager girl, Georgia, in the first part of the book. 
In the very outset, Georgia is struggling emotionally trying to make sense out of her mother's death. Formerly a firm believer in perfection and either/or concept, Georgia drifts into the recent past arguing with her mother when the mother was alive and the present where she lives with her father, depressingly an alcoholic, and a minor brother that she has to tend to when a girl called H comes into her life. 
The other part is a biographical narration by a 17th century renaissance fresco painter, Francesco Del Cossa right from the painter's infantile years of first memories through adolescence till death.
How to be both is a powerful novel that will leave you thinking for days. Nominated for the Man Booker prize for 2014, this is a compelling, fast paced philosophical must read. 
We give it a 9.5 in a scale of 10.

The Hidden Enemy Part III: Irrationality How It Works It's Way.

Continued from part-II

We start this article with an example from a regular daily life.

Suppose you are passing through your neighbourhood and suddenly a couple of stray dogs start barking at you.

What will you do?

You will probably try to scare them off by pelting stones at them or maybe, at best, ignore them.  

How will you react?

You will probably be scared yourself and feel adrenaline getting pumped into your body or you might get irritated. Or maybe you will try to avoid them.

And in any case you will definitely make a mental note of the stray dogs in this part of the town.

Now imagine another scenario. Suppose that you are passing through the same neighbourhood and this time the couple of barking dogs happen to be owned by someone and are not stray dogs.

You will notice that this time your action and reaction will not be the same. Instead of taking the very logical course that you took in the former case, you are more likely to take the issue to your heart and fret and fume about it. You will take the matter to a different level and will end up feeling hurt after hurting the feelings of the dog owner. You will be emotionally bruised.

As you can now see for yourself, in the latter case your ego came to the forefront engulfing all the rational thinking part of you which made you behave in a very illogical way.

If you happen to see a monkey just outside your door, you will be too careful to avoid looking into its eyes and will slowly move out after locking your door without disturbing it. Or you might feign picking up a rock and throw it at it in order to scare it away.

However, if the monkey were owned by your next door neighbour, you will start monkeying around with the person.
This is how ego surfaces and you do not realize that you are under the spell of your ego. Now it is controlling you like a master controls a slave. You have been enslaved.

The ego takes charge in the very moment when one realizes that there is someone around in proximity. The self image that one has of oneself takes precedence immediately. It assumes full control.
Then ensues a period of illogical course of actions and reactions whereby one drags oneself into a spiralling vacuum of despair and anxiety. 
It may be noted that the same thing happens in happy kind of situations too and this is precisely why the sages of ancient India had reiterated that happiness is transient and momentary in nature. It does not last for long. How can it, when it is based on a false concept of you on yourself. 

Through continued meditation and careful analysis over the lost centuries, the sages of ancient world also discovered that when one is not alone, the ego takes over one's psyche through the first thought that pops up in one's mind.
The first thought occurs so rapidly in a fraction of a second that one is hardly even aware of it. It creeps in without one's being aware of it and soon after a chain of thoughts gets triggered by the ego, which has assumed full control, engaging the person and propelling him into the next moment. Your self image, the ego, is there inside you all the time, albeit dormant, and with the first thought that occurs when someone is around, it takes over.
The foremost point to be noted here is that ego is born with society, it comes to fore only when there is someone around, someone near you or in your thoughts. It also implies that ego disappears when there is no one around you, neither physically nor in thoughts.
The second point is that ego takes control of you through the first thought that flashes in your mind soon as you realize that you are not alone, ie there is someone/are people around you. But this first thought is so short lived that one hardly becomes aware of it.
The third point is that a chain of thoughts gets triggered by the ego engaging oneself to make it easy for ego to take full control propelling oneself into an irrational continuum.
                                                
                                                         continued into Part IV...

The Hidden Enemy Part II: Rational To Irrational.

Continued from Part-I ...
Whenever you feel troubled or miserable you might tend to blame people, circumstances, yourself or luck but what is actually going on inside you is that you in fact are actually feeling bad about yourself. 
Next time when you feel miserable, just sit aside for a while and close your eyes. Try to think of the real source of your angst and if you try really hard, you will find lurking inside yourself, your ego, which is nothing else but your image of yourself, and somehow it got refuted. Your self image which has taken over your real self controls you and whenever it is invalidated, you will feel uncomfortable and bad about yourself- you will feel sad, miserable, hurt or angry.

Similarly when you feel elated and happy, delve inside yourself and you will find that it is just your own image that was confirmed somehow, by people around you or by yourself. For a moment you feel elated because at that moment you felt comfortable with your pseudo- self which in fact is just the image of you on yourself and nothing more. It is not true. It is not real you and so time and again you must have realised that happiness is momentary and transitory in nature.

In either case, it is not your true self that is happy or sad. It is just your ego that is happy or sad and it will make you react in a very arbitrary way. It makes us act irrationally and take the most foolish steps all the time.

On a fine day, you might wake up in the morning all rested and reposed feeling healthy and strong. You may plan the events of the day in the most logical and plausible way possible. But when it comes to actually going about the plan you will see that mostly it never turns out as it was planned. If you do a bit of unbiased introspection, you will find that it was mostly you yourself who took the most arbitrary irrational and wayward decision inspite of remembering the initial plan. And you might wonder why you did what you shouldn't have done and that it is not your true nature to blow up your own plans which were for your own benefit. But you will never remember why you took the foolish decision.

It is the ego that takes full control the moment we step outside and started noticing people. Ego, as you can now see, creeps in mostly when we are amongst people. 
The sages of Ancient India said that the ego is a by product of living in society. When there is no society, there is no ego at all. Once you are in a society, your real self that is endowed with logical reasoning and intelligent thinking takes refuge somewhere inside the dark recesses of your subconscious and the false part of you- your ego comes to the fore and assumes full control over you without your knowing. Then it makes you behave in the most stupidest of all ways. The real you which made you leave the house comfortably has now left you. You start feeling uncomfortable and uneasy.

You might start feeling that there is something wrong with your circumstances or with the people around you.

This is what ego does to you. You can no longer control anything around you. You will feel defeated and powerless. It will make you do the most irrational things without letting you realize that it was your ego that made you act in the most irresponsible manner.

                                           ....  Click here - Continued to Part III

The Man Booker Prize 2014 - The shortlist. With Book Review

The shortlist of the Man Booker Prize 2014 for fiction 2014 was announced on 09 September 2014. The panel consisted of not just two women and four men; it represented an ecumenical distribution of nationalities too.

The American authors Joshua Ferris and Karen Joy Fowler were selected along with three British writers — Howard Jacobson, Neel Mukherjee and Ali Smith — and the Australian Richard Flanagan.

The winner of the prize, worth around $80,000 and widely considered the most prestigious literary award in Britain, will be announced on Oct.14.

We had published the long list of thirteen books in an earlier post. In this article we present the six books that have been shortlisted with the opening lines (a book lovers dream)  and a few words on their review.

 “The mouth is a weird place.” 
                        ....From “To Rise Again at a Decent Hour” by Joshua Ferris

A satirical novel about identity theft in the virtual world we live in, how the technology that connects us also isolates us. A Manhattan dentist, realizes that someone is impersonating him online using his name and identity. As the web of lies gets soul frightening, he gets drawn into a vortex of emotions as he finally gets to meet his virtual doppelganger.

An must read on the journey to self awareness.

 “Mornings weren’t good for either of them.” –From “J” by Howard Jacobson

J is a dystopian novel set in a future world still trying to recover from a historical catastrophe that it only half acknowledges and does not officially remember and is always referred to as "what happened, if it happened").

Nothing is banned, just effectively discouraged or reasonably justified. But Esme Nussbaum is seeing the chinks and faulted lines in the society when she was forced to resign from her position. There is a budding romance between Ailinn Solomons and Kevern Cohen , who believe they have been brought together by a higher power . As their daily life draw them into ever-increasing danger, she must do everything to keep them together—whatever the cost; for memories and names have not been purged from the lives without a reason.

A novel which makes one think on the maladies of our current lifestyle, written in his great style.

“Why at the beginning of things is there always light?”
                 ... “The Narrow Road to the Deep North” by Richard Flanagan

A notable tourist attraction in Thailand is the bridge “over the River Kwai”—part of the Death Railway built during World War II by the Japanese using the labor of Allied POWs under atrocious conditions.

In the grim conditions of a Japanese POW camp on the Thai-Burma death railway, Australian surgeon Dorrigo Evans is haunted by his past indiscretions. As he uses all effort to protect men under his command from starvation, from cholera and a grim life, he receives a letter that will change his life forever. Written about war, death, love and evolving as a man from a war hero,this novel should be a good read

“Consider this moral conundrum for a moment, George’s mother says to George who’s sitting in the front passenger seat.” 
                          ......From one version of “How to be Both” by Ali Smith

There are two parts of this book, one with the first half first and the other with the first half second. Would the book have read differently if one took the other part first?

This interesting novel with themes of art, and the digital age, one would feel like being in a time loop which eventually makes you admire the timelessness of everything as it is mirrored back to you.

Borrowing from painting’s fresco technique to make double layers, the books characters move between art and time effortlessly. There’s a renaissance artist Francesco del Cossa of the 1460s and a child George of the 1960s.

 Two tales as told from view of the two coalesce into a single thread. What is the importance of art, how does it touch our lives?

.

 “A third of the way through the half-mile walk from the landlord’s house to his hut, Nitai Das’s feet begin to sway.” 
                            ...........From “The Lives of Others” by Neel Mukherjee.

Set in Calcutta, 1967-1970, the Ghosh family live in the world where they think they are superior and emotionally cut from all others who are below their status. Empathy is not a practiced virtue here. The grandson, Supratik has become dangerously involved in student political activism. He leaves behind everything with a note, compelled by an idealistic desire to change his life and the world around him. Meanwhile the small dramas and bourgeois life meanders through its characters, petty issues pitched against the ever changing world outside. The family eyes the changes like an ostrich, as the society around them cracks and the divides widen.

This is a sensitive portrait of daily life of a family as it is challenged by inevitable change: a difference between the have and have not’s, the divide between generations, and the need to bridge them.

“Those who know me now will be surprised to learn that I was a great talker as a child.”

                 ...From “We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves”
                                                                               by Karen Joy Fowler

What if you had a behavioral psychologist for a father, who changes your identity as a ‘monkey girl’ compelled to mimic her elder sister, who is actually a chimp raised in a human family?

Then one day you are sent away to your grandparents and return only to realize that your sister has been given away. The normal human emotions of sibling rivalry, the wish to move out of the shadow of the elder sister, Fern, the distractions that eventually is what she misses later, make Rosemary ask a lot of questions to herself, as she dons the garb of silence.

Are our memories real or do we adjust them to suit our stories as we grow up? Is there a balance between memory and fiction, and the perennial question, what makes us human? 

This warm and thought provoking family story would be an explorative journey within oneself. 

Any comment or guess of on who the winner will be is welcome.