Cache (Hidden)

I have not seen anything like this movie before. It is an exercise in frustration. It is however an interesting, tense and positive kind of frustration. This type of orchestrated frustration is worth examining.

This is not a pipe.

1968
by René Magritte

A McGuffin

The master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock built some his most suspense filled movies around a key concept called a McGuffin. Many famous films of his like Notorious, North by Northwest and Psycho were triumphs of this aspect of story telling. What exactly is a McGuffin?

Words and ideas. The power of rephrasing?

Today people urge you to be enthusiastic about everything. It is fascinating for me to find out that such a common word as enthusiasm has a topsy-turvy history behind it.

The word enthusiasm comes from Greek and has a religious angle to its meaning which is very nicely hidden under the surface. For a certain time, enthusiasm was used in a negative and derogatory sense. This is certainly one of the words that has now undergone a complete transformation.

Every time I pick up this book for a read, I end up going through it with the same enthusiasm I felt when I read it for the first time. Despite being a recurring book in my bookshelf for more than a dozen years, this book retains a freshness. The kind of freshness one feels when plunging into reading a new, interesting book. I am not a big fan of philosophical books. Dreary arguments are not the reason I pick it up to read.

There is more to it.

These days, I am recovering from a long drought of reading. I seem to walk into bookshops and spend a lot of time leafing through the ones that catch my fancy, the ones recommended by friends, critics and of course, web reviews.

After spending 20 to 30 minutes, I seem to be drawn towards the stationery section. There, I usually pick up a beautiful, luxuriously built blank notebook. The kind that would have lavish binding, gilded pages and superb paper quality.

What’s going on?