15 Park Avenue
‘15 Park Avenue’ is a film by Aparna Sen on schizophrenics. Are ‘they’ in a delusion or does each person merely have a different notion of reality?
When one looks into a kaleidoscope, the same light brings out different patterns based on how you see or perhaps what you want to see. The Hindu notion of reality as an illusion is brought out subtly. The film points out that not only does a schizophrenic seem to be running after something, but also in a way, we all are. The doctor in the film points out that reality is relative and that what more people accept as real is more real than individual perceptions of it. Much in the same way, in language, convention plays a major role in deciding what meaning we assign to what word. The word ‘chair’ for example brings out the image of something to sit on only because a majority of the English speakers have decided to. People call it ‘kursi’ or other things in other languages. The word ‘chair’ doesn’t inherently mean the thing it stands for. It is only our collective notion. If we all decide to call it ‘raich’ or ‘ chacha’ from tomorrow, the new word will represent the concept of the chair. Another interesting thing in this context is the fact that the sounds or letters in a word don’t constitute an idea in segments. That is, the word chair doesn’t represent anything called hair though it has all the letters in it except ‘c’.
The story of the blind men who interpreted the elephant as a pillar or a fan and ‘saw’ the same reality differently because they felt only parts of it and not the whole, is also interesting to note in this context.
It is what we see that matters and not what is.