Anand Gandhi

One singular aspiration in all my work is to attain the state of awe. And what is awe? Awe is when you come across something that is infinitely complex and inexplicable by all your memory and thought systems — and yet comprehensible in a singular gasp of experience.

Anand Gandhi (born 26 September 1980) is a screenwriter, film director, public speaker and media producer from India.

See also:

Ship of Theseus (film)

Quotes

You may be compassionate and charitable, but end up working for an institution that writes off the death of thousands as collateral damage. So be empathetic, but even more importantly, work towards building empathetic systems.

• The promise of survival beyond individual death or dispersion appeals to the most primal driving force of existence. Promises of transcendence have evolved out of the thriving desire to ward off the inevitable threat of individual death. Most systems propose a more or less perfect immortality – one where memories, hopes, desires, knowledge and even experiences survive the death of the physical body. An engagement and acceptance of this meme makes death particularly irrelevant. The upholding of the promise at the cost of individual sacrifice becomes acceptable. Individual sacrifices even become necessary in validating the promise.
  • "There is no free will, but you have a choice! (And the role of memes in choice-creation)" in Handbags and Lingo (3 November 2013)

• Seekers of meaning may not find meaning, but they do find each other. (From 'Eulogy for a Friend')

• Simulation systems (mathematical models, philosophical thought experiments) that don’t have real world applications are like SPACs - shells with all the paperwork in place till something operational is ready to merge into them.

• What if we were as concerned with what we put into our minds as we are becoming with what we put into our bodies? What if there was inalienable evidence that culture is as important as food - would we scorn at junk culture?
  • "The Biology of Story"

• We now remain, at least on paper, one of the last few countries in the world, where if you don’t die successfully, you’ll go to jail for attempting.
  • "Landscape of the individual" in Indian Express (14 September 2015)

• The ability and the desire to transmit knowhow, intention, and insight to others around us have co-evolved with humanity itself. Mixed reality is a huge milestone in that human project of record keeping, perspective sharing, empathising, and merging with the ‘other’, a project that began with the first cave painting, or even earlier.
  • "‘Cost of Coal’, India’s first documentary in VR" in The Hindu (16 July 2016)

• As a child, I wanted to become a scientist, a magician, a poet, an architect, an illustrator, a sculptor, an actor, a philosopher, a photographer, a playwright and an animator. So by the time I was 13 or 14, I was convinced that it would be possible to a be of all of these if I made films.
  • "One-on-one with Ship of Theseus’ Anand Gandhi" at film army (3 September 2012)

• We are closer to understanding ourselves and our environment than we were two centuries or two thousand years ago, so we are definitely more equipped with knowledge and information than the Buddha was, or even Darwin was. Darwin didn’t know about DNA, we know about DNA. Just imagine if we could go back in time and inform Darwin about DNA or inform Buddha about it. What they were dealing with was intuition, with a logical breakdown of what they had observed. We have scientific tools for those things. We are using the energies of the past to create something new and I’m very confident that what I’ve done has never been done before. I feel no pressure about it, I’m just taking the next step.
  • "Anand Gandhi’s Ship of Theseus: Winning Prizes, Conquering Hearts" by E. Nina Rothe, in Huffington Post (12 June 2013)

• In a deeply interconnected world, there is no 'other'.
  • "India takes world's first VR narrative docu 'Right to Pray' to TIFF!" Business Standard (24 Aug 2016)

• One singular aspiration in all my work is to attain the state of awe. And what is awe? Awe is when you come across something that is infinitely complex and inexplicable by all your memory and thought systems — and yet comprehensible in a singular gasp of experience. It is an incredibly important emotion for me - the inexplicable is an invitation to engage with the cosmic void that humanity has been in a constant dialogue with for 250,000 years. And for the longest time, the void hasn’t answered back. In the last century, we have steadily found relevant answers, exponentially accumulating and organising into a more holistic meaning. A century ago the narrative was (and it still is, in many places) that if we probe too much into our universe and selves, we would lose out on our capacity of wonder, but exactly the reverse that has happened. When we’ve looked into the molecule we found the atom and when we looked into the atom we found the electron and when we’ve looked at the electron we have experienced sheer awe at its quantum probabilistic nature. So each time the scope of awe has expanded— expanding with it, our foresight, worldview and free will — for me, a film has to grasp that, and translate that experience.
  • In response to the question about Ship of Theseus: "What do you expect audiences to get out of this film?", in "The Intersection of Cinema, Art, and Existential Philosophy" by Girija Sankar, in Khabar (May 2014)

Quotes about Anand Gandhi

• Ship of Theseus writer and director Anand Gandhi is one of those remarkable people who seem to know nearly everything and yet doesn’t boast about it or try to make you feel small.
  • E. Nina Rothe, in "Anand Gandhi’s Ship of Theseus: Winning Prizes, Conquering Hearts", in Huffington Post (12 June 2013)

• My new fav person to discuss tech, ethics, and the future - filmmaker Anand Gandhi.
  • Rob Nail on Twitter

External links

• Anand Gandhi on IMDb