The Others
“The Others” was one of the my favorite movies starring Nicole Kidman from 2001. The premise of the movie takes place in an huge old bungalow in the woods. Nicole plays “Grace”, a mother of two children waiting for her husband to return from the war. Grace suffers from bouts of depression, night mares and wakes up in sleep with loud screams. The story begins with a maid and a gardener responding to an paper advertisement by Grace to take care of the house and children whom Grace recruits. During a night, Grace witnesses a piano playing itself and becomes convinced that the house is haunted and becomes desperate to get rid of the ghosts.The conflicts among the characters — Grace, her kids, the maid, gardener and occasional ghosts keep you engrossed till the end. The real twist comes towards the end of the movie and everything changes in the last few minutes, which I will reveal a bit later in this story.
An year ago I watched “The Planets”- a 5 part 2019 documentary that was televised in PBS channel. With breathtaking visuals this series transports you into our solar system and reveal the mysteries and discuss theories around the planets evolution ( A worth watch — Never knew that the rings around the Saturn are just ice cubes and the diamonds rain on the Saturn and dissolve as they fall into the core). I also learnt that our human life is just a fraction of a nano second in the timeline of events relative to our earth, solar system and universe formation. After completing the series I was ruminating how our planet earth is hanging out there “all alone” in the empty cold dark space in the solar system/universe and how mysterious the existence of earth is and how vulnerable the life on earth is (A small asteroid wiped off entire dinosaurs some 66 million years ago)?
Life wasn’t there on this planet earth in the beginning. Some extraordinary combination of elements in the exact right proportions lead to a single cell life thriving on this earth. Later every other species evolved from this single cell organism.
As the latest entrants on to this planet earth (animals came to earth millions years before us), humans survived many catastrophes, multiplied the species and spawned the entire earth driven by our necessity, greed, selfishness and ego . Wed dug deep in the earth looking for minerals leaving huge holes that kept mocking at us resembling our own graves. We poked holes in the Ozone layer with the pollution from processing these minerals. We scraped through the surface of the earth destroying the habitats, ensuring extinction of numerous species and the ones remaining are thrown to the pockets of earth designated as wild life sanctuaries, national parks and protected forests.
If an elephant enters farm/village or a cheetah roams in the city streets, we feel that the animals encroached upon us and take immediate steps either to kill them or shove them into the designated wild life conservatories. But did we ever stop encroaching their habitats? Lets forget about their habitats, how about the protected areas? The safety of the wildlife in these designated areas is still debatable — The pouching of Saki, a one year old tigress two decades ago in Nehru Zoological Park, Hyderabad, India by unidentified culprits or Killing of elephant with explosive-laden fruit recently in Kerala, India a week ago are prime examples.
Going back to Nicole Kidman movie “The Others”, the final twist is about Grace realizing that the “others” are the family that has moved into the bungalow, and that she, her children and the servants are dead and are actual ghosts in the house. We humans play the characters of Grace, the kids and the servants. We believe that entire earth is ours and animals that enter our boundaries as the “intruders” (as Nicole feels about the actual residents of the house) and try to eradicate them. When do we realize that we are the intruders that encroached upon the wild life habitats? How do we learn to protect these species and allow them to coexist?
In one of the blogs Human Life, the author tries to deduce and quantify how precious human life is (I recommend reading through it). It is believed human life is so precious that the chance of being born as a human is one in a billion. So what are we really doing with this ”precious life” ?
Thanks for your feedback and encouragement! Hope I can bring in many more stories with your support!
