Final weekend, I watched a Bollywood film The Storyteller, presuming the film could be in regards to the artwork of writing or telling of tales, but it surely was far more than that. A storyteller is employed by a businessman who counts sheep however to no avail. The insomniac businessman believes that storytelling, as in childhood, can lull one simply into slumber.
The connection between the 2 males is antipodal due to their geographies, backgrounds and, most significantly, their philosophies of life. The storyteller expresses his socialist proclivities via his super-casual digs at capitalism.
The businessman is a lonesome man who admittedly does not perceive a lot past cash and accounting books. At one level, he even derides the storyteller’s artwork by saying, “Yeh duniya sochne waalon ki nahin karne waalon ki hey” i.e. this world is for doers not thinkers.
Quick forwarding, the storyteller finds certainly one of his tales revealed in an area journal, however with a special pen identify. He’s shocked to see the image of the businessman as the author of the story. The businessman is charged with plagiarism not of the storyteller’s personal tales however of legendary writers like Rabindranath Tagore.
The truth is, the storyteller, after discovering his personal tales being handed off as that of the businessman, had began telling him the tales of legendary writers. Because the businessman was not an informed individual, he could not see via the storyteller’s revengeful lure.
The businessman needed to impress his former love curiosity, who values artistry over enterprise, that he had turn into a person of letters. He loses his newly achieved attraction to his love curiosity who leaves him for good, this time extra satisfied than ever of his capitalist mentality.
Professor Joshua Spodek talks of a litmus take a look at of originality. For a person searching for genuineness and authenticity, nothing reveals the dearth of both higher than a girl. As a result of few issues are much less engaging to a girl than inauthenticity and disingenuousness. She is going to stroll away if we speak completely different than we behave. Likewise, few issues are extra engaging than authenticity and genuineness.
On the finish of the film, each the characters are proven writing a narrative of one another as each have been in possession of a stimulating painful expertise. The businessman had had a set of unread classical books to intellectualise himself via osmosis. However he could not get any impetus to inform or write tales to woo his misplaced love.
Equally, although the storyteller might conjure up fantastical tales with the slightest inspiration, he lacked the visceral urge to pen down his emotions right into a cerebral deal with. The trail to creating artwork begins with the search inside for who we’re. Due to this fact, the best takeaway from creative manufacturing is in discovering ourselves and the trail to get there.
The film subtly juxtaposes two financial philosophies via its characters. The storyteller represents a socialist ethos the place creativity is shared, communal and accessible, whereas the businessman embodies capitalism’s penchant for proudly owning and monetising mental property.
Nowadays, the speak of the city in and out of doors the realm of know-how both demonises AI as a dystopian drive or romanticises it as a utopian fantasy. The film begins with a quote by Man Ray, an American visible artist: “To create is divine, to breed is human.” Launched at a time when AI instruments like ChatGPT and DeepSeek are revolutionising content material creation, the film serves as a poignant exploration of plagiarism and the capitalist commodification of creativity.
Not like creation, which is seen as an unique act, copy is usually dismissed as spinoff, mechanical or inferior. Outsourcing creativity to algorithms will dilute the worth of human creativeness: mental labour to realize originality will likely be changed by comfort.
Human ingenuity mirrors divine craftsmanship. Creativity, as thinker Hannah Arendt famous, is an expression of ‘natality’ – the capability to start anew, to inject originality into the world. Arendt claims that our natality – our situation of being born – is the supply or root of our capability to start, i.e., of our capability to provoke one thing new and novel.