The Kerala Tourism video

Quite the FB phenomenon this video has been over the past few days/weeks. Slightly delayed, but here is what I made of the little beauty..



Details of the video per se, are irrelevant to this post, given as you can peruse through them at your convenience, from the embeddiment above, or otherwise. What one attempts to look at, is what it 'says' to you, and the why's and the how's of it.

The scenic opulence, almost a given with Santosh Sivan, is rather grand indeed. With the music to match, the stage sets itself for the key element to be revealed.

And then... what exactly happens then..?

In the remainder of the video, once your eyes and other such have adjusted to what is on offer, it tells you something very simple, in a manner that is unprecedented to your experiences on this front thus far. Furthermore, what it just whispered, in spite of its relative simplicity and what not, also happens to be one of the relatives to the universal existential crisis that plagues us all, among other things.

"Your moment is waiting"
Never before, in the many diversely hued tourism promotion campaigns one has witnessed, has the core message addressed something this intense, this deeply human; going beyond the relatively trite levels of culture, history and entertainment.
The moment may be taken to mean anything it means to one, but the audacity to link that to something as exploited as tourism, and then through an audio-visual masterpiece, do some semblance of justice to such a steep ask, is commendable.
That fleeting, invisible moment of transcendence, of realization, of life, has been portrayed like never before. One can completely imagine Sivan shaking within even as he thought up the fragments in his mind.

It is of course fitting, that this exploration of the inner domain, albeit facilitated by external supports, should be showcased by a province of this great land that has for millennia has pioneered in such endeavours.

Mortal arguments that the video doesn't say too much, given that such 'moments' may be lived in other places as well, shall receive a brief look from me, and the following:
Yes, the message of the moment is universal, and quite frankly, location invariant. However, that does not take anything away from the fact that nobody had thought of/dared to put such a thought to film before, at least in India; and also that in spite of the idyllics on display in the video, the coming together of elements so as to introduce oneself to oneself, is completely imaginable and possible, and in fact not as idyllic as the locales that surround it.

To me at least, the video purely as an indicator of where we are in terms of what and how we express of that which infests the mortal mind, is reason enough to smile, and laud the efforts of those behind it.