The end is the beginning of the end.

I don't like watching movie trailers. Or reading book reviews.

Because I start seeing things in my head. I see an off-white mongrel with a black eye-patch and a muddied tan, sunbathing atop an antique wooden recliner in the red-cemented front yard on a hot, dusty afternoon; the languid and chronic creaking of the punkha 20 feet above ground level, blowing warm wafts of air in 5.65-minute intervals; the hard-boiled heat piercing through sloping asbestos sheets that paint the white, dog-paw stained walls with a golden glow; the monotonous hiss of the broom sweeping away the sand, the leaves and all the ill will out of gigantic gates that temporarily enclose the free, innocent minds of the little imps who just arrived on ship from England and who dot the summer skyline of every home in Mount Lavinia. All this, the moment I read "Ceylon, 1942" at the backside of a book.

I begin to hear voices that tell me that Jason Raj Malhotra Bourne does not die in the movie. So when I see him exposing his macho, hairy chest with the tattoo of his mother’s name on it, and supposedly dying after the attack of a dozen baddies and their clones wielding AK-47s and shaking with evil laughter to aid the trajectory of the aimless bullets, I know that in the end, he will come out of a hole at the other end of the world, change his identity with a thick, bushy, curled-up moustache so that even his Siamese twin won’t recognise him and will round up the said baddies and their clones who were happily celebrating his death by chewing on groundnuts and with deft dishoom-dishooms, will drag them to their graves after mouthing vengeance-for-past-atrocities-induced blood-curdling soliloquies.

And so, I shut my eyes tight and stick my fingers in my ear and mumble prayer-like mutterings to drown out the majestic baritone that has made many a voice over artist rich by simply uttering inconsequential inanities like "Before the end of the world, there will rise a hero who will save mankind from doom" (and womankind from Paris Hilton's unreal reality shows), the whip-whoosh of graphic supers appearing faster than the speed of light and disappearing behind your ears, and the fast-paced theme song of the flick that gets faster and faster as it progresses from title sequence to background music for racy car chases that are scripted with the sole intention of being ranked the fastest car chase in Anyletter+ollywood history. Similarly, I shut my eyes and flip a book that’s lying face down.

More than anything, I hate the fact that a 3-hour or a 300-page work of art can be stripped naked and made to stand in front of a highly opinionated audience who will waste no time in making judgements from what they can see or read in 3 seconds. It's an insult to the art form and the artists. To the author and his imagination.

If life can be surmised with a mere Veni, Vidi, Vici, why would we spend hours in a queue before the opening of a big show? Or wait a year in advance for a popular book to release. And if we really do all that, why take the life out of it by knowing well in advance who dies on Page 436?