Who is Subplot A?

• Arun Lakra is a writer masquerading as an eye surgeon.
• He wrote a song to impress a girl.
• She married him anyway.
• So he put together a virtual band.
• This is their debut album.

And to those generous individuals who contributed their time, energy, and immense talent to this improbable album, who put up with dumb questions and silly ideas, whose support and indulgence and unwarranted encouragement actually lifted this project off the ground, Arun says,

What were you thinking???

And THANK YOU 

to...

Dana Crawford, Paul Distefano, Scott Henderson, Sonal Jogia, Bobby McAlister, Craig Newnes, Clea Roddick, Joel Schaefer, Wes Sutherland, Irene Tuazon, Emre Unal

What is Tragic Romantic Mocku Fantasy?

IF THIS ALBUM WERE FOOD, the words would be the ice cream. The words would be one scoop each of chocolate chip cookie dough, triple tornado, and rocky road, with no vanilla for miles The music would be the cone… nice enough, but really, everybody knows it’s about the ice cream. Who orders just a cone? Except maybe Mozart. He had a thing for cones. And music. Without words.

IF THIS ALBUM WERE A FILM, it would be a cross-genre indie flick written by Charlie Kaufman, directed partly in black and white by Christopher Nolan, starring John Cleese, Steve Buscemi, Ben Stiller, and Marisa Tomei, with a cameo by Jon Stewart as Homer Simpson. It would receive mixed critical reviews at Sundance (after being soundly rejected by Cannes) before the Weinsteins purchase the rights and launch this film to moderate indie box office success. It would become a contentious coffee-shop conversation piece, as viewers debated the dichotomous layers, the suspend-your-disbelief plot twists, the self-indulgent meta-story, and the question of whether the film is goofy with serious undertones or serious with goofy undertones. One reviewer would momentarily lose his glib façade and write with unfortunate sincerity, “I laughed, I cried” (but regrettably his review was never published as his editor fired him on the spot for inappropriate and non-ironic use of a trite 70s cliché. He now works at Hallmark.)

IF THIS ALBUM WERE A BODY PART, it would be the corpus callosum, that intricate network of tissue which connects the left brain to the right, which allows creative juices and pheromones and unspellchecked chaos to flow bidirectionally to the logical and mathematical chess-playing inner geek who pronounces Linux with a soft “I” and gets you to your office on time. It would offer valuable public relations and conflict resolution services to the heart and cerebral cortex and groin.

IF THIS ALBUM WERE... UM... AN ALBUM, people who constantly complain about the intra-album musical homogeneity of current releases would have no choice but to shut up. People who lament the paucity of meaningful lyrics and fresh perspective would never again be allowed to use the word paucity in public. People who moan that today’s music can’t skip like a 33 1/3 needle from silly to poignant to irreverent to angina-inducing-sincerity before revealing secret truths by playing a song backwards, will have to throw their preconceptions out the window of their 1973 Pinto.

Who is Arun Lakra?

Arun doesn’t like talking about himself in third person. It makes him feel a little silly and British-royalty-like. He is not amused....

So here's something somebody wrote about him... in third person...

©Medical Post (2007)

Barbara Kermode-Scott

Calgary ophthalmologist Dr. Arun Lakra might not describe himself as a “Renaissance guy” but to any observer, this physician certainly fulfils the European Renaissance ideal. He has a well-rounded approach to education and life, loves both arts and sciences, and endeavors to “develop his capacities as fully as possible,” as Renaissance gentlemen were expected to do.

On the sciences side, Dr. Lakra is passionate about eyes. He loves his work as a general ophthalmologist with an interest in refractive surgery. On the arts side, Arun Lakra is a writer, playwright and musician. He loves words and would love to succeed in the literary world.

Recently Dr. Lakra received much media attention and correspondence from around the world after he and his band, SubPlot A, wrote and performed a protest song, Pluto Rocks!, to raise awareness and funds to save the planet Pluto from demotion. They wrote the song in August 2006 after the International Astronomical Union(IAU)decided to demote Pluto to “dwarf planet” status. Dr. Lakra, who plays keyboards, says SubPlot A wanted to let the world know Pluto is “dwarf to nobody.”

Dr. Lakra says he understood the science and logic behind the decision to demote Pluto but was still disappointed when he heard the news, even though he didn’t really know why. “Maybe it was having two little kids. I was thinking they’re going to grow up in a universe where there’s no ninth planet in the solar system. . . . There was something inside me that said ‘How can they take this planet away from us? No, they can’t do that! How can I register my protest?’ ”

Pluto Rocks! is inspired by the emotion, nostalgia and romance that Pluto inspires, he says. The song is “kind of goofy” and “half fun and half serious. . . . It’s not rocket science, but it’s interesting. . . . "

SubPlot A has already experienced some success. Earlier this year, the band’s song Saturday Night was selected as a finalist for the 2006 Calgary Folkfest Songwriting Competition in the Best Newcomer category. Yet Dr. Lakra says songwriting is not his first passion.

“Songwriting is more or less a tangent. I would say I’m a writer more than I am a musician. Music is just one more way of telling whatever story I want to write about. I don’t have any ambitions to be a rock star. I’ll leave that to my children.”

Dr. Lakra says at the end of medical school and early in his residency he had “an intense revelation” that he was passionate about the creative process and words specifically. “My hope is to be able to find a way to continue to write . . . and ultimately to achieve success in that domain while being able to balance the other things in my life as well.”

Dr. Lakra finished his medical training 10 years ago. There have been times when he was practising medicine full-time and needed to put the creative process on a back burner. At other times he has been able to take a break from medicine and spend much more time on writing.

“Right now I divide my week down the middle—half medicine and half creative. It’s a nice luxury to have. I find I’m most productive—in both senses—when I have a block of time to devote to medicine and a block of time to devote to creative stuff. I find it difficult to go back and forth. In the writing world I typically try to keep my MD out of things, and when I’m in the medical world I try to keep my writing out of that.”

Dr. Lakra writes screenplays(primarily)as well as plays and lyrics. He has devoted some serious time and energy to writing screenplays but realizes a screenplay is a very difficult to transform into a film because of the magnitude of dollars required. There’s also a learning curve. “The first few scripts I wrote—in hindsight—weren’t really very good,” he says. “You learn the craft as you go along.”

Dr. Lakra’s theatrical play, Blind Spot, was workshopped at the Alberta Playwright’s Network and had a staged reading at Calgary’s Lunchbox Theatre. Blind Spot was based in medicine(explaining retinitis pigmentosa), but most of Lakra’s writing is not medical. Currently he’s working on a film script for a supernatural thriller titled Voices. In the fall of 2005, Voices was selected as a finalist in the highly competitive Praxis Centre for Screenwriters Competition. The script was workshopped in Vancouver, and has been optioned by a producer.

“It’s exciting,” he says. “Now instead of a having a one-in-a-million shot, it has a one-in-100,000 shot. It’s a step in the right direction.”

Dr. Lakra undertook his undergraduate studies at the University of Calgary, McGill University and the University of Toronto. He graduated from the U of T in 1990 with the Cody Silver Medal. After completing his internship at the University of Hawaii, he did his ophthalmology residency back at the U of T and trained in retinal diseases. He then returned to Calgary and worked initially as a locum at the Gimbel Eye Centre. In 1997, he co-authored a book with Howard Gimbel, called In Search of 20/20: Everything You Need to Know About Laser Eye Surgery. Dr. Lakra undertook laser eye surgeries in Calgary from 1998 to 2006. He currently practises general ophthalmology at the Calgary Ophthalmology Centre.

Medicine is often said to be an art as well as a science. “I’ve encountered a lot of people within the medical profession who have a strong creative side to them as well,” says Dr. Lakra. Analytical skills help the creative process. “With a very complex story, for example, you need the creative side of your brain to come up with ideas and the logical side of your brain to execute them.”