I met Mr.X a couple of weeks back at a smoky joint. We meet at irregular intervals to eat an elaborate meal and talk. Usually we talk ideas (methods of peaceful submission to death, ways to beat forgetfulness, how to keep in shape without dieting etc) and mostly about the deadline of extinction of the human race. Sometimes we discuss women and very rarely children and pornography. We also talk a lot about cricket and football and nowadays about badminton (pursuant to the consist performance of Saina Nehwal).
I am going to now reproduce the conversation from memory that I had with this man in the dimly-lit joint. While we talked (that night) there was no distracting music playing at the eatery. There was no much noise barring the whirring of the air-conditioners, the movement of the waiters, waiters talking to each other and other guests and the people eating or waiting for food talking to each other in hush-hush tones and the general cling-clong of cutlery. The absence of loud sounds, whether pleasant or unpleasant, helped me to focus all my energies to the occasion, especially the conversation. There have been other instances when we have been witness (of visual and audio type) to a brawl (between an arrogant waiter and a hyper anorexic salesman), a quarrel (between two aged fat men over what to order for dessert), a hot bombshell (in a pink top and a black skirt) and rendition of rock-and-roll music (1967 April number) on an ancient sound system: all highly disturbing and infringing experiences. The conversation (the one I referred to) went something like this –
I: You look thoughtful; no, I mean clouded with dark thoughts; so much so that you are actually looking dark!
Mr.X: It’s not untrue; my appetite has gone done. I don’t think about sex any more. I don’t fanaticize. I feel very tense, you know.
I: Tense? Tense about what? About losing your balls, you mean?
Mr.X: Do I have my balls at the right place; I’m not so sure? I’m actually anxious about my son.
I: Why; what has he done: fallen in love with your house-maid or what? Both of you are in competition, is it?
Mr.X: Be serious Mr.Y for a change! If I die now what will happen to my son; have you ever thought about that?
I: You expect me to think over such top-class shit. Are you truly contemplating suicide? Disappearance for a change: I mean something like that?
Mr.X: Suppose if I die a natural death: my heart just stops pumping all of a sudden. My son is a teenager. He does not have a mother or family support from my side or hers. Where does he go for his upbringing? He would be left absolutely lonely after I die. An orphan almost! Last night I cried a lot holding him to my chest; the funny part is he felt suffocated and advised me to consult a psychiatrist. I did not sleep the whole night. I saw him sleeping and snoring so beautifully. He has an angelic face, surely an angelic face Mr.Y!
I: What can you do about dieing? When it is time to go you go, not a bit before or after. But you worry me: if you move away from erotica you die before you are actually dead.
Mr.X: I know that for sure. But I just feel horribly pensive with the thought of how lonely my son is already and how much lonelier he can get after I die.
I: You want to die?
Mr.X: No Mr.Y, I want to live, at least for the next 10 years by which time my son would have settled in life.
I: So you will live Mr.X! Lock yourself up in a balloon up in the air away from this heat, dust, smoke and fungus and bacteria and virus! And, above all, women, you idiot!
Mr.X: Do I take my son as well in this balloon?
I: You can.
Mr.X: What kind of a future does he have by spending a life in a balloon?
I: Then get him married to the youngest daughter of your house-maid. This way you will leave behind his wife and in-laws to take care of him in your absence.
Mr.X: You have come up with a very good idea; I must compliment the efforts of your brains Mr.Y. Marriage is a good way to extend your social base. But the marriage of the kind that you propose would be illegal. I don’t want my son to take law in his hands.
I: Stuff it up your ass Mr.X; you have a nice one.
My kind words about Mr.X’s butts lifted his spirits; the shadows on his face were gone and he ordered for keema parantha with methi-chicken.
Later in the night after dinner instead of bidding farewell at the gate of the restaurant, which we did otherwise (having paid a small tip to the mustachioed pot-bellied doorman from North India for saluting us), we set out for an adjoining park famous for its carnivorous insects and ants of all variety; lepers, beggars, drug addicts and dealers taking shelter within its unfolding darkness and dull-faced-sullen-ugly whores. This was because Mr.X demanded of me to tell him a detective story.
So I told him a detective story: The Chief Minister of a State wakes up soggy one rainy cloudy grey morning to find his face in the mirror irrevocably changed - precisely having been replaced by the face of the Leader of the Opposition. He does not shave or clean his teeth and tongue or discharge his turds; instead he phones the Home Secretary right away in a spell of shock urging him to leave all business and set up a task force of the best police officers in the State with the only agenda of finding out the terrorist-miscreant who had committed such a murderous act: cutting up his original face (which was liked by women of all cultures) followed by replacing it with a hateful face (which means that this face was amputated in the first place); and most importantly, to go all out in search of his original face. The thought upper-most in the Chief Minister’s mind ran thus – Was somebody already wearing it (his face) and buying a Honda Civic or was it (already pale and ever paling now that it was drained off its blood supply) cooling off in the refrigerator of a homicidal lunatic?
As the story unfolded chapter by chapter, taking Mr.X’s wholehearted attention within its layers, a planet burst into flames in the sky. Needless to say, we could not reach the concluding chapter of the story; instead we had Swirl designer ice-cream stuffed with fruits and nuts.
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Monologue
1.
Last year I lost my mother. For a few moments her corpse had reclined on a steel stretcher on the portico of a modern hospital before it was loaded on to a flower decked hearse. She was surrounded by family, friends and relatives all crying hysterically. I had not cried until then. As I took a last look at her – she almost resembled a happily-sleeping fluffy doll – being drowned under a white ocean of flowers and garlands, tears welled up from nowhere blinding and diffusing my sight with the thunder of another thought and later replaced by a strange succession of images. Was she able to look through my flesh and blood, now that she was dead and could defy the universe of mechanics and quantum theories, to that vortex of nothingness and darkness that was essentially me? What happens when mothers realize that their sons are very different from the shadows they beam in social life? And then, all of a sudden, I saw my corpse illumined and stretched on a marble tiled floor looking into the soul of my son against an azure sky. He was looking at my swollen cold face with emotion and as the clouds emanating from my decaying stagnant body floated through the chill of air and entered his skull diving past his large beautiful eyes I could hear the complex tunes floating on the waves of a lonely sea: a sea that was eager to last a lifetime and show brilliant paths inside the cosmos to its earnest navigators. Was he relieved that I was no more there to pile on him with what I thought was right and wrong? Did he move away from me long back: in his adolescent years? Was he tired of and suffocated by me? Did he repent about following to tee what I asked of him to do in life and most of it that he did so wonderfully? Did he feel wasted and pent up in life that I felt many a time during my own lifetime? Did he sometimes wish to hit me or kill me or just that I was dead? Did he feel lonelier, after I was declared dead, like a sea with its lighthouse vanquished by its majestic shore?
2.
Two images terrify me constantly. I will share with you these images: a half-slice of a crimson moon staring at you through the grey veil of a swimming monsoon cloud suddenly sighted from a dilapidated terrace window (it takes my breath away making me feel somebody - the Surgeon of all Surgeons - is drilling through me and dissecting me inside out) and the view of the Bombay city from a distance on a monsoon night as your flight takes off westwards flying atop the Arabian Sea and then taking a swerve north-eastwards towards the city and the lights of emeralds, diamonds, pearls and neons blazing and some of them forming trajectories of sparkling photons visible through the flock of low flying dark clouds giving me an impression that the city is on the verge of a terrible exothermic explosion and the world will come to its end just in front of my eyes.
Last year I lost my mother. For a few moments her corpse had reclined on a steel stretcher on the portico of a modern hospital before it was loaded on to a flower decked hearse. She was surrounded by family, friends and relatives all crying hysterically. I had not cried until then. As I took a last look at her – she almost resembled a happily-sleeping fluffy doll – being drowned under a white ocean of flowers and garlands, tears welled up from nowhere blinding and diffusing my sight with the thunder of another thought and later replaced by a strange succession of images. Was she able to look through my flesh and blood, now that she was dead and could defy the universe of mechanics and quantum theories, to that vortex of nothingness and darkness that was essentially me? What happens when mothers realize that their sons are very different from the shadows they beam in social life? And then, all of a sudden, I saw my corpse illumined and stretched on a marble tiled floor looking into the soul of my son against an azure sky. He was looking at my swollen cold face with emotion and as the clouds emanating from my decaying stagnant body floated through the chill of air and entered his skull diving past his large beautiful eyes I could hear the complex tunes floating on the waves of a lonely sea: a sea that was eager to last a lifetime and show brilliant paths inside the cosmos to its earnest navigators. Was he relieved that I was no more there to pile on him with what I thought was right and wrong? Did he move away from me long back: in his adolescent years? Was he tired of and suffocated by me? Did he repent about following to tee what I asked of him to do in life and most of it that he did so wonderfully? Did he feel wasted and pent up in life that I felt many a time during my own lifetime? Did he sometimes wish to hit me or kill me or just that I was dead? Did he feel lonelier, after I was declared dead, like a sea with its lighthouse vanquished by its majestic shore?
2.
Two images terrify me constantly. I will share with you these images: a half-slice of a crimson moon staring at you through the grey veil of a swimming monsoon cloud suddenly sighted from a dilapidated terrace window (it takes my breath away making me feel somebody - the Surgeon of all Surgeons - is drilling through me and dissecting me inside out) and the view of the Bombay city from a distance on a monsoon night as your flight takes off westwards flying atop the Arabian Sea and then taking a swerve north-eastwards towards the city and the lights of emeralds, diamonds, pearls and neons blazing and some of them forming trajectories of sparkling photons visible through the flock of low flying dark clouds giving me an impression that the city is on the verge of a terrible exothermic explosion and the world will come to its end just in front of my eyes.
Tuesday, June 8, 2010
Bhopal, Bengal Politics, Al Gore, Way To Go
As I listened to the verdict of a Bhopal Court in connection with the 1984 Bhopal Gas Tragedy on TV yesterday night, I felt a surge of rage rocking my body: all the more heightened by the pictures of Raghu Rai taken a day after the incident had happened converting Bhopal into a city of death. The verdict sounded so bizarre, absurd and out of proportion that I felt like doing something dramatic and equally insane to match its banality. Political democracy works on the fundamental premise of the existence of a nation-state, which is an aggregate of its institutions. When these institutions become subservient to corporate interests repeatedly by design one cannot help concluding that political democracy is a failed idea, rather an idea that was essentially designed as a long-term cloak / veil to shadow the true interests of its original thinkers: patrons of free-market economy who later on became ruthless colonialists and much later, imperialists. What do you do to a group of well-bred and educated people responsible for the crime of killing over 20,000 people; maiming 100,000 people; creating genetic disorder to many (to be transferred congenitally to generations to come), and caused irreversible damage to the environment and ecology of a city beyond repair; and further that invisible cluster of people who are responsible for letting the former group go scot-free? Does this question sound as if it was transported out of a revenge thriller? It makes me laugh to think that the original petitioners (activists out of victim communities) in the case were not even allowed to enter the Court yesterday and Section 144 was imposed around the Court premises in apprehension of reprisals from activists and victim groups! Most of them were seen crying after the verdict was out.
What a choice Bengalis have between the CPI(M) and the TMC! The CPI(M) has proven the sham of communism and socialism in India. They do have their own significance: primarily because of the economic movements that they championed in both the agricultural and industrial sectors (and also in organizing students and other kinds of labor) to keep a check on the injustices and atrocities of the semi-feudal and semi-capitalist regime in the country who had usurped political control immediately after the independence, and also, in keeping the plurality of discourse in learning, culture and arts. However, what needs to be remembered is they did all this before they came to power and once they were in power they did everything to abandon their original politics they espoused and associate themselves with all kinds of nerve centers and money bags that helped them to prolong, extend and intensify their power at the expense of the well-being of citizens they claimed to represent. They started doing everything the opposite of what they preached orally and in writing. All the institutions of administrations and of other kinds from top to bottom were converted into thought-ghettos. Opposition was crumbled by deceit: arrangement was reached very early on and at the highest level that the opposition should not tinker with the Left Front at the state level and in return they would not tinker with the Congress at the central level. In addition, state Congress leaders who were powerful in their local regions continued with their reign without any opposition from the Left Front. It turned out to be a wonderful arrangement. Factories and industries started closing one after the other without any protest. Barring the original land reforms that were initiated at the beginning years of coming to power, later on converted into fiefdoms of party machinery (more efficient replacement to the earlier zamindari system), the lowest and the most disposed peasantry continued to suffer. The tribals could never enter the mainstream. The Gorkhas and adivasis of North Bengal were snubbed down; they remained as alienated as they were. The jungle mafia went on the rampage unchecked. The real estate mafia works overtime in Bengal. According to me, Mamata Banerjee has only one thing to her credit: she did not succumb to the Left Front – Congress arrangement in Bengal. She has been steadfast and consistent in her opposition to the Left Front without any vision. Because she had no vision, people in Bengal never rallied around her. Then came the flashpoints: Nandigram and Singur. People’s frustrations had reached a peak. Today, they are, it seems, ready to take a plunge into an unknown darkness having suffered years of forced blindness.
Many columns and articles have been written recently centering on Al Gores’s marriage and divorce, detailing reasons of an ever-increasing phenomenon: middle-age and beyond middle-age divorces in urban communities. Why do marriages break after 20 or 30 years of conjugal life? One of the reasons that I did not find listed in these columns and articles is: the idea of love at an enhanced age takes on a different meaning and intensity, and its looming possibility because modern urban living is bringing a lot many middle-age and beyond middle-age men and women in close contact with other men and women of varied groups, communities and identities thereby increasing the chances of an amorous relationship between them. Over the years of marriage one discovers many futilities of family life hidden within the layers of togetherness; dreams break but nobody discusses these things. You fall in love; you marry; you build a home and acquire wealth and plan for insurance, investments and inheritance; you produce babies. Such is the common trajectory made up of material dreams. Middle-age or beyond middle-age love is usually bereft of such a well recognized trajectory. It is mostly dreamless and lived / experienced for the present because of which it is powerful and has the potential of dashing all your assumptions.
I am presently reading Upamanyu Chatterjee’s Way To Go. I am enjoying every bit of the book. I will end today’s post with a line from this book: From wherever you are, Ma, you are going to teach me, aren’t you, and knock into my head till it clamps there, that death too is a vanity?
What a choice Bengalis have between the CPI(M) and the TMC! The CPI(M) has proven the sham of communism and socialism in India. They do have their own significance: primarily because of the economic movements that they championed in both the agricultural and industrial sectors (and also in organizing students and other kinds of labor) to keep a check on the injustices and atrocities of the semi-feudal and semi-capitalist regime in the country who had usurped political control immediately after the independence, and also, in keeping the plurality of discourse in learning, culture and arts. However, what needs to be remembered is they did all this before they came to power and once they were in power they did everything to abandon their original politics they espoused and associate themselves with all kinds of nerve centers and money bags that helped them to prolong, extend and intensify their power at the expense of the well-being of citizens they claimed to represent. They started doing everything the opposite of what they preached orally and in writing. All the institutions of administrations and of other kinds from top to bottom were converted into thought-ghettos. Opposition was crumbled by deceit: arrangement was reached very early on and at the highest level that the opposition should not tinker with the Left Front at the state level and in return they would not tinker with the Congress at the central level. In addition, state Congress leaders who were powerful in their local regions continued with their reign without any opposition from the Left Front. It turned out to be a wonderful arrangement. Factories and industries started closing one after the other without any protest. Barring the original land reforms that were initiated at the beginning years of coming to power, later on converted into fiefdoms of party machinery (more efficient replacement to the earlier zamindari system), the lowest and the most disposed peasantry continued to suffer. The tribals could never enter the mainstream. The Gorkhas and adivasis of North Bengal were snubbed down; they remained as alienated as they were. The jungle mafia went on the rampage unchecked. The real estate mafia works overtime in Bengal. According to me, Mamata Banerjee has only one thing to her credit: she did not succumb to the Left Front – Congress arrangement in Bengal. She has been steadfast and consistent in her opposition to the Left Front without any vision. Because she had no vision, people in Bengal never rallied around her. Then came the flashpoints: Nandigram and Singur. People’s frustrations had reached a peak. Today, they are, it seems, ready to take a plunge into an unknown darkness having suffered years of forced blindness.
Many columns and articles have been written recently centering on Al Gores’s marriage and divorce, detailing reasons of an ever-increasing phenomenon: middle-age and beyond middle-age divorces in urban communities. Why do marriages break after 20 or 30 years of conjugal life? One of the reasons that I did not find listed in these columns and articles is: the idea of love at an enhanced age takes on a different meaning and intensity, and its looming possibility because modern urban living is bringing a lot many middle-age and beyond middle-age men and women in close contact with other men and women of varied groups, communities and identities thereby increasing the chances of an amorous relationship between them. Over the years of marriage one discovers many futilities of family life hidden within the layers of togetherness; dreams break but nobody discusses these things. You fall in love; you marry; you build a home and acquire wealth and plan for insurance, investments and inheritance; you produce babies. Such is the common trajectory made up of material dreams. Middle-age or beyond middle-age love is usually bereft of such a well recognized trajectory. It is mostly dreamless and lived / experienced for the present because of which it is powerful and has the potential of dashing all your assumptions.
I am presently reading Upamanyu Chatterjee’s Way To Go. I am enjoying every bit of the book. I will end today’s post with a line from this book: From wherever you are, Ma, you are going to teach me, aren’t you, and knock into my head till it clamps there, that death too is a vanity?
Tuesday, June 1, 2010
Underground
1.
What was happening to Africa, Latin America and a few Asian countries in the last century is happening today in Europe: Greece, Portugal, Ireland and Spain. These countries have unsustainable levels of debt. Economic globalization is consolidating large scale private debt which is being consequentially passed onto governments for bailout thereby affecting the liquidity and in certain cases validity and sovereignty of national governments. Economic globalization is a melting pot where weaker economies have been / are being / will be washed out by the hurricane of most powerful economies. Capitalism (where selling and buying is at the core of existence and forms the aim of all aspirations) ideally thrives on an expenditure driven revenue model. To boost expenditure taxes are kept low and debts are made available at attractive terms. This drives the debt market to an extent when you invariably end up with a large gap between what you lend and what you take as security against what you lend. Gradually, comes a stage when debt defaulting reaches a pinnacle affecting the liquidity of the lenders. The lenders are essentially banks and financial institutions. The process of lending / borrowing is three tiered: individual, institutional and national. Banks being interconnected in an economically globalized world, it results in a cascading chain reaction affecting many of them to get wiped out like a pack of cards crumbling to a wind. This has severe political and social consequences, which we are witnessing globally at the present moment.
Capitalism, imperialism and economic globalization have irrevocably altered the relation between men: communities, nations and races; between men and nature most destructively, fuelled by greed, enterprise and innovation of the human species, and almost brought us close to extinction. Yet, no political experiment: socialism and communism including, have been successful in replacing or reversing this process. Why? We know for sure that altruism, philanthropy and charity cannot heal the evils already caused. How do we stop large corporations disregard ecological concerns connected with: land, water, air, forests, flora and fauna, animals and communities living outside the glare of modernity? How do we stop powerful countries from going to war and amass large military and nuclear arsenal? How do we stop formation of surrogate colonies: economic, political and cultural? Who will give food, healthcare and justice to the weak, dispossessed and the underprivileged? Who will reverse large hordes of hapless unemployed youth falling prey to the lure of being a militant or a mercenary?
Capitalism has given us wonderful institutions of knowledge, legislation, judiciary, and regulation and of many other kinds that have helped us to know about us and the universe including appreciating its most ambivalent aspects but it has also wrapped us up in a veil of aspiration to live immortally thereby rendering us ineffective to act. Capitalism which makes great capital out of individual privacy is its greatest destroyer. It loves its specific set of institutions to keep a round-the-clock vigil on its citizenry.
I believe there is something fundamental in human consciousness that arouses it to self-destruction which is why capitalism in spite of its worst moments of crisis has survived to lead us to the impending extinction of human race.
2.
In the last few weeks I have read 5 books: 3 by Paul Auster – The New York Trilogy; Invisible and The Inner Life of Martin Frost; Underground by Haruki Murakami and Hotel Iris by Yoko Ogawa. I realized to my surprise that I have traveled from far West to far East in a very short span of time gaining interesting insight.
The New York Trilogy is a compilation of 3 novels – City of Glass, Ghosts and Locked Room. These are 3 brilliant variations on the classic detective story in the back drop of New York emerging to be a strange, compelling landscape in which identities merge or fade and questions serve only to further obscure the truth.
Martin Frost is a screenplay on which Paul Auster later directed and co-produced a film by the same name. This is a study of solitude, creative imagination being translated to a work of art and the conflict arising out of the surreal and real. It is contrived at places. However, the character – Fortunato – who gives us comic relief is wonderfully created. I have not seen the film and as such, am unable to comment on how it was translated on celluloid. This book contains an interview of Paul Auster (in the beginning of the book) with Celine Curol (Canadian novelist, essayist and journalist) done on 22 August 2006 on the making of the film. Somewhere during the interview he lays stress on stories being told in various forms including narrative poems. I found it supportive of a medium I seem to advocate quite often.
Invisible is a brilliant novel narrated by 3 different people. The story traces from 1967 to 2007: from Morningside Heights to the left bank of Paris to a remote island in the Caribbean. 2 things struck me in the novel like lightning: i) Adam Walker’s incestuous relationship with his elder sister and its graphic listing by Adam Walker and denied by his sister 40 years later, and ii) Rudolf Born’s ruthless and manipulative streak. The eternal cloud of human consciousness marvelously evolves through the maze of events arising out of the actions of each and every principal character in this novel.
Hotel Iris sends chills down the spine at places. A young girl named Mari (aged 17 and works in her ancestral hotel as a front-office assistant cum cook cum housekeeper) in a suburban coastal town of Japan falls for a man 50 years senior to her. He lives alone on an island and is a translator by profession. He is one kind of a man in the town and quite a different person while on the island. He inflicts pleasure and pain on the girl in abandon. Mari worships him and is devoted to him and even submits to his violence during sex pleasurably. Thereafter appears the nephew of the translator who is a tongueless painter. Mari falls for him too and they make love. The translator being suspicious of her interactions with his nephew catches her during an interrogation on the island. The novel ends abruptly.
Underground is a poignant witness tale (intriguingly dispassionate to the core) on the 20 March 1995 sarin gas attack in the Tokyo subway. It is broadly divided into 2 parts: i) accounts of victims, and ii) accounts of people who were close to the perpetrators. In the Preface to Part 1 Murakami ends with the lines: You get up at the normal time, wash, dress, breakfast, and head for the subway station. You board the train, crowded as usual. Nothing out of the ordinary. It promises to be a run-of-the-mill day. Until five men indisguise poke at the floor of the carriage with the sharpened tips of their umbrellas, puncturing some plastic bags filled with a strange liquid … At the end of Part 1 in an essay Murakami writes: Haven’t you offered some part of your Self to someone (or something), and taken on the “narrative” in return? Haven’t we entrusted some part of our personality to some greater System or Order? And if so, has not the System at some stage demanded of us some kind of “insanity”? Is the narrative you now possess really and truly your own? Are your dreams really your own dreams? Might not they be someone else’s visions that could sooner or later turn into nightmares? In the Afterword Murakami brilliantly brings out one of the central conflicts of modern life: The question was asked over and over again, “How could such elite, highly educated people believe in such a ridiculous, dangerous new religion?” Certainly it’s true that the Aum leadership was composed of elite people with distinguished academic credentials, so it’s little wonder that everyone was shocked to discover this. The fact that such upwardly-mobile people easily rejected the positions in society that were promised them and ran off to join a new religion is a serious indication, many have said, that there is a fatal defect in the Japanese education system. However, as I went through the process of interviewing these Aum members and former members, one thing I felt quite strongly was that it wasn’t in spite of being part of the elite that they went in that direction, but precisely because they were part of the elite.
3.
We have to do Underground in India on: the Sikh riots in Delhi; demolition of the Babri Masjid; the Hindu-Muslim riots in Gujarat post-Godhra; the violence in Nandigram and Singur in connection with farmlands being snatched away by governments for industries; the conflict between the tribals, the Maoists and the security forces in the backdrop of forests and mines; the Narmada Bachao Andolan – to be able to grasp ‘what is modern India’ in full measure.
What was happening to Africa, Latin America and a few Asian countries in the last century is happening today in Europe: Greece, Portugal, Ireland and Spain. These countries have unsustainable levels of debt. Economic globalization is consolidating large scale private debt which is being consequentially passed onto governments for bailout thereby affecting the liquidity and in certain cases validity and sovereignty of national governments. Economic globalization is a melting pot where weaker economies have been / are being / will be washed out by the hurricane of most powerful economies. Capitalism (where selling and buying is at the core of existence and forms the aim of all aspirations) ideally thrives on an expenditure driven revenue model. To boost expenditure taxes are kept low and debts are made available at attractive terms. This drives the debt market to an extent when you invariably end up with a large gap between what you lend and what you take as security against what you lend. Gradually, comes a stage when debt defaulting reaches a pinnacle affecting the liquidity of the lenders. The lenders are essentially banks and financial institutions. The process of lending / borrowing is three tiered: individual, institutional and national. Banks being interconnected in an economically globalized world, it results in a cascading chain reaction affecting many of them to get wiped out like a pack of cards crumbling to a wind. This has severe political and social consequences, which we are witnessing globally at the present moment.
Capitalism, imperialism and economic globalization have irrevocably altered the relation between men: communities, nations and races; between men and nature most destructively, fuelled by greed, enterprise and innovation of the human species, and almost brought us close to extinction. Yet, no political experiment: socialism and communism including, have been successful in replacing or reversing this process. Why? We know for sure that altruism, philanthropy and charity cannot heal the evils already caused. How do we stop large corporations disregard ecological concerns connected with: land, water, air, forests, flora and fauna, animals and communities living outside the glare of modernity? How do we stop powerful countries from going to war and amass large military and nuclear arsenal? How do we stop formation of surrogate colonies: economic, political and cultural? Who will give food, healthcare and justice to the weak, dispossessed and the underprivileged? Who will reverse large hordes of hapless unemployed youth falling prey to the lure of being a militant or a mercenary?
Capitalism has given us wonderful institutions of knowledge, legislation, judiciary, and regulation and of many other kinds that have helped us to know about us and the universe including appreciating its most ambivalent aspects but it has also wrapped us up in a veil of aspiration to live immortally thereby rendering us ineffective to act. Capitalism which makes great capital out of individual privacy is its greatest destroyer. It loves its specific set of institutions to keep a round-the-clock vigil on its citizenry.
I believe there is something fundamental in human consciousness that arouses it to self-destruction which is why capitalism in spite of its worst moments of crisis has survived to lead us to the impending extinction of human race.
2.
In the last few weeks I have read 5 books: 3 by Paul Auster – The New York Trilogy; Invisible and The Inner Life of Martin Frost; Underground by Haruki Murakami and Hotel Iris by Yoko Ogawa. I realized to my surprise that I have traveled from far West to far East in a very short span of time gaining interesting insight.
The New York Trilogy is a compilation of 3 novels – City of Glass, Ghosts and Locked Room. These are 3 brilliant variations on the classic detective story in the back drop of New York emerging to be a strange, compelling landscape in which identities merge or fade and questions serve only to further obscure the truth.
Martin Frost is a screenplay on which Paul Auster later directed and co-produced a film by the same name. This is a study of solitude, creative imagination being translated to a work of art and the conflict arising out of the surreal and real. It is contrived at places. However, the character – Fortunato – who gives us comic relief is wonderfully created. I have not seen the film and as such, am unable to comment on how it was translated on celluloid. This book contains an interview of Paul Auster (in the beginning of the book) with Celine Curol (Canadian novelist, essayist and journalist) done on 22 August 2006 on the making of the film. Somewhere during the interview he lays stress on stories being told in various forms including narrative poems. I found it supportive of a medium I seem to advocate quite often.
Invisible is a brilliant novel narrated by 3 different people. The story traces from 1967 to 2007: from Morningside Heights to the left bank of Paris to a remote island in the Caribbean. 2 things struck me in the novel like lightning: i) Adam Walker’s incestuous relationship with his elder sister and its graphic listing by Adam Walker and denied by his sister 40 years later, and ii) Rudolf Born’s ruthless and manipulative streak. The eternal cloud of human consciousness marvelously evolves through the maze of events arising out of the actions of each and every principal character in this novel.
Hotel Iris sends chills down the spine at places. A young girl named Mari (aged 17 and works in her ancestral hotel as a front-office assistant cum cook cum housekeeper) in a suburban coastal town of Japan falls for a man 50 years senior to her. He lives alone on an island and is a translator by profession. He is one kind of a man in the town and quite a different person while on the island. He inflicts pleasure and pain on the girl in abandon. Mari worships him and is devoted to him and even submits to his violence during sex pleasurably. Thereafter appears the nephew of the translator who is a tongueless painter. Mari falls for him too and they make love. The translator being suspicious of her interactions with his nephew catches her during an interrogation on the island. The novel ends abruptly.
Underground is a poignant witness tale (intriguingly dispassionate to the core) on the 20 March 1995 sarin gas attack in the Tokyo subway. It is broadly divided into 2 parts: i) accounts of victims, and ii) accounts of people who were close to the perpetrators. In the Preface to Part 1 Murakami ends with the lines: You get up at the normal time, wash, dress, breakfast, and head for the subway station. You board the train, crowded as usual. Nothing out of the ordinary. It promises to be a run-of-the-mill day. Until five men indisguise poke at the floor of the carriage with the sharpened tips of their umbrellas, puncturing some plastic bags filled with a strange liquid … At the end of Part 1 in an essay Murakami writes: Haven’t you offered some part of your Self to someone (or something), and taken on the “narrative” in return? Haven’t we entrusted some part of our personality to some greater System or Order? And if so, has not the System at some stage demanded of us some kind of “insanity”? Is the narrative you now possess really and truly your own? Are your dreams really your own dreams? Might not they be someone else’s visions that could sooner or later turn into nightmares? In the Afterword Murakami brilliantly brings out one of the central conflicts of modern life: The question was asked over and over again, “How could such elite, highly educated people believe in such a ridiculous, dangerous new religion?” Certainly it’s true that the Aum leadership was composed of elite people with distinguished academic credentials, so it’s little wonder that everyone was shocked to discover this. The fact that such upwardly-mobile people easily rejected the positions in society that were promised them and ran off to join a new religion is a serious indication, many have said, that there is a fatal defect in the Japanese education system. However, as I went through the process of interviewing these Aum members and former members, one thing I felt quite strongly was that it wasn’t in spite of being part of the elite that they went in that direction, but precisely because they were part of the elite.
3.
We have to do Underground in India on: the Sikh riots in Delhi; demolition of the Babri Masjid; the Hindu-Muslim riots in Gujarat post-Godhra; the violence in Nandigram and Singur in connection with farmlands being snatched away by governments for industries; the conflict between the tribals, the Maoists and the security forces in the backdrop of forests and mines; the Narmada Bachao Andolan – to be able to grasp ‘what is modern India’ in full measure.
Saturday, May 8, 2010
Death Sentence and others
1.
I am puzzled by the boisterous and brazen display of euphoria by sections of the Indian public – mostly, the aspirational middle class – at the death sentencing of a foot soldier of terrorism, who in my comprehension is a terribly rudderless, impoverished, destructive and an indoctrinated fellow (that he is a criminal and a mass murderer by the law books is not in question). The genesis of such hysteria has something to do with the way 26/11 was televised on national television. English educated anchors from elite institutions – national and international - otherwise proponents of liberal democracy in chat room discussions went ballistic and jingoistic losing almost all sense of objective reporting. They were dishonest to their profession: not by default of course but by design. TV caters to the aspirational and upwardly mobile middle class. And, this class generally produces top-notch servants engaged in sincere lobbying work for the hyper-rich: their interests and policies. As such, TV must reflect what they do, aspire to do and mostly, create a perfect cultural network that would validate such interests and policies. War and security are big-time business. Sometime after the 2nd World War the CIA invested huge sums of money in insurgency operations in various countries to suit to their foreign policy strategies. This created an invisible but massive transnational industry of terrorism and caused the rebirth of a very different kind of political Islam. This model was later replicated by many countries. The investments made in Pakistan have been colossal. Terrorism, like all State militaries, recruits its foot soldiers from the most impoverished and decimated families. Terrorism justifies war against terrorism and creates two kinds of businesses directly: for the military contractors and the construction contractors (once, landscapes and waterscapes are destroyed in wars). International funding agencies pitch in with development funds for such reconstruction. At a macro-scale it is a joint venture of various agencies: military contractors, construction contractors, State militaries, terrorist organizations, international funding agencies and political institutions (they help in rallying public opinion and mobilizing support of citizenry so that there is least public hostility to this joint venture). In this interconnected matrix one is inseparable from the other. The impoverished lot supplies foot soldiers on a sustained basis because for them extinction is an on-going reality, and tragically, it is the impoverished lot who suffer the most in terrorist outbreaks. One may be happy in granting a death sentence to one of the lowest-rung faces of terrorism but one must not forget that this is what the brains of terrorism also want because there are innumerable such faces in the queue to replicate one long lost face. Would it not have been more daunting to try to take a hard path to unravel with honesty - the machinations of how terror networks function and the details of their brains and nerve centers - through this foot soldier? But quite clearly the State is not interested in doing that. The State has vested interests in not letting out such truth out in the open. Because that might prove a long held conjecture that: The State’s security agencies representing the State (this is true for almost all States) and the terrorist organizations are two mouths at opposite ends of the same dragon. TV pitches in with the right dose of emotional flapping while reporting a heinous terrorist attack so that we are mediated with frenzied yearnings for retributive death of its foot soldiers, quite easily forgetting that with the death of each foot soldier dies material evidence of the nexus between big players in the background.
2.
Aparajita and Pratidwandi – both films by Satyajit Ray – are two of my most favorite films. I am generously exposed to world cinema. I have watched these two films innumerable times; I have seen many other classics multiple number of times. In the last five years these two films have communicated to me a few things which went unnoticed during my younger days. Aparajita now raises an eternal question in my soul: How ethical and wholesome is your search for personal education, enlightenment and prosperity having left (almost abandoned) your mother – alone, sick and impoverished – in the decaying darkness of a dwindling village home? Similar questions were raised by Tolstoy in Anna Karenina through Levin in its concluding chapters. I think this question can help us look at modernity in its most truthful image. The modern world has sadly even altered the ferocious (otherwise natural) love and bonding between siblings. Pratidwandi reflects a strange love between an elder brother and his younger sister in a lower middle class Bengali (refugee) home, and that is not the main story of the film (mind you). It is a mix of protective brotherly love, anxious paternal love and combative love that exists between lovers. The elder brother is silently (not overtly) in search of a species of birds; his sister is in deep love with its voice having listened to its crooning and whistles (together with his elder brother) during a childhood rendezvous. A year back I had seen this film with my son. He foxed me with an embarrassing question: Do you love your sister this much?
3.
A friend of my son announced a few days back: Kaku, we are likely to be flooded with C grade Universities from the west; thanks to the new Education Bill! What will happen to our Universities like … (he named many including the one from where my sister has done her Doctorate and I have graduated), institutions built on years of hard work, sincerity and imagination? I did not respond. I only realized once again: How lopsided is this battle between the East and the West! How much the East colludes with the West in self-annihilation!
4.
I will start writing a drama very soon: a crime thriller with a mother and a daughter relationship at its core!
I am puzzled by the boisterous and brazen display of euphoria by sections of the Indian public – mostly, the aspirational middle class – at the death sentencing of a foot soldier of terrorism, who in my comprehension is a terribly rudderless, impoverished, destructive and an indoctrinated fellow (that he is a criminal and a mass murderer by the law books is not in question). The genesis of such hysteria has something to do with the way 26/11 was televised on national television. English educated anchors from elite institutions – national and international - otherwise proponents of liberal democracy in chat room discussions went ballistic and jingoistic losing almost all sense of objective reporting. They were dishonest to their profession: not by default of course but by design. TV caters to the aspirational and upwardly mobile middle class. And, this class generally produces top-notch servants engaged in sincere lobbying work for the hyper-rich: their interests and policies. As such, TV must reflect what they do, aspire to do and mostly, create a perfect cultural network that would validate such interests and policies. War and security are big-time business. Sometime after the 2nd World War the CIA invested huge sums of money in insurgency operations in various countries to suit to their foreign policy strategies. This created an invisible but massive transnational industry of terrorism and caused the rebirth of a very different kind of political Islam. This model was later replicated by many countries. The investments made in Pakistan have been colossal. Terrorism, like all State militaries, recruits its foot soldiers from the most impoverished and decimated families. Terrorism justifies war against terrorism and creates two kinds of businesses directly: for the military contractors and the construction contractors (once, landscapes and waterscapes are destroyed in wars). International funding agencies pitch in with development funds for such reconstruction. At a macro-scale it is a joint venture of various agencies: military contractors, construction contractors, State militaries, terrorist organizations, international funding agencies and political institutions (they help in rallying public opinion and mobilizing support of citizenry so that there is least public hostility to this joint venture). In this interconnected matrix one is inseparable from the other. The impoverished lot supplies foot soldiers on a sustained basis because for them extinction is an on-going reality, and tragically, it is the impoverished lot who suffer the most in terrorist outbreaks. One may be happy in granting a death sentence to one of the lowest-rung faces of terrorism but one must not forget that this is what the brains of terrorism also want because there are innumerable such faces in the queue to replicate one long lost face. Would it not have been more daunting to try to take a hard path to unravel with honesty - the machinations of how terror networks function and the details of their brains and nerve centers - through this foot soldier? But quite clearly the State is not interested in doing that. The State has vested interests in not letting out such truth out in the open. Because that might prove a long held conjecture that: The State’s security agencies representing the State (this is true for almost all States) and the terrorist organizations are two mouths at opposite ends of the same dragon. TV pitches in with the right dose of emotional flapping while reporting a heinous terrorist attack so that we are mediated with frenzied yearnings for retributive death of its foot soldiers, quite easily forgetting that with the death of each foot soldier dies material evidence of the nexus between big players in the background.
2.
Aparajita and Pratidwandi – both films by Satyajit Ray – are two of my most favorite films. I am generously exposed to world cinema. I have watched these two films innumerable times; I have seen many other classics multiple number of times. In the last five years these two films have communicated to me a few things which went unnoticed during my younger days. Aparajita now raises an eternal question in my soul: How ethical and wholesome is your search for personal education, enlightenment and prosperity having left (almost abandoned) your mother – alone, sick and impoverished – in the decaying darkness of a dwindling village home? Similar questions were raised by Tolstoy in Anna Karenina through Levin in its concluding chapters. I think this question can help us look at modernity in its most truthful image. The modern world has sadly even altered the ferocious (otherwise natural) love and bonding between siblings. Pratidwandi reflects a strange love between an elder brother and his younger sister in a lower middle class Bengali (refugee) home, and that is not the main story of the film (mind you). It is a mix of protective brotherly love, anxious paternal love and combative love that exists between lovers. The elder brother is silently (not overtly) in search of a species of birds; his sister is in deep love with its voice having listened to its crooning and whistles (together with his elder brother) during a childhood rendezvous. A year back I had seen this film with my son. He foxed me with an embarrassing question: Do you love your sister this much?
3.
A friend of my son announced a few days back: Kaku, we are likely to be flooded with C grade Universities from the west; thanks to the new Education Bill! What will happen to our Universities like … (he named many including the one from where my sister has done her Doctorate and I have graduated), institutions built on years of hard work, sincerity and imagination? I did not respond. I only realized once again: How lopsided is this battle between the East and the West! How much the East colludes with the West in self-annihilation!
4.
I will start writing a drama very soon: a crime thriller with a mother and a daughter relationship at its core!
Friday, April 16, 2010
Dantewara; Sania-Shoaib-Ayesha; IPL & Tiger Woods
In the recent past, I was closely following news reports in connection with the events as mentioned below:
1. The Dantewara conflict resulting in the death of approximately 80 security personnel at the hands of local Maoist militia / insurgents.
2. The Sania Mirza – Shoaib Malik – Ayesha Siddiqui marriage and divorce saga.
3. The bidding and the finalization of the Pune and the Kochi IPL franchisees at astronomical sums.
4. The return of Tiger Woods.
These incidents were reported in the print and the electronic media almost round the clock with enormous heat, hype and passion. I was sucked into its tantalizing vortex of reportage and opinions without any realistic resistance.
Once the immediacy of the news had settled in, I got some time to reflect. The issues that came to my mind are:
Is there a way to move forward or have we been irrevocably entangled in a downward helix of self-annihilation of the human race?
Yesterday I saw a wonderful film: Paul Greengrass’s Green Zone – US Army on their deceitful trail to find WMDs in Iraq and they ended up finding none!!!
1. The Dantewara conflict resulting in the death of approximately 80 security personnel at the hands of local Maoist militia / insurgents.
2. The Sania Mirza – Shoaib Malik – Ayesha Siddiqui marriage and divorce saga.
3. The bidding and the finalization of the Pune and the Kochi IPL franchisees at astronomical sums.
4. The return of Tiger Woods.
These incidents were reported in the print and the electronic media almost round the clock with enormous heat, hype and passion. I was sucked into its tantalizing vortex of reportage and opinions without any realistic resistance.
Once the immediacy of the news had settled in, I got some time to reflect. The issues that came to my mind are:
- The classical divide between the rich (the powerful who run the state) and the poor (the disenfranchised) has converted itself into a full scale war in the darkness of the jungles, low lying mountains and plateaus of India. The war is between greed on one side and human survival on the other. The upwardly mobile class hangs onto the political idea of democracy and nationalism propagated by the rich (but not practiced). The English speaking media is a complex matrix of organizations that works to the interests of large corporations (including compradors) and is run and fuelled by the most capable and suave members of this upwardly mobile community. The mainstream vernacular media is not free of vested interests; it operates as the branch offices of the mainstream English speaking media. The variance in styling of similar content – more aggressive, insensitive, unrefined and sensationalizing – is worth noticing. The poor has very little voice in the institutions of the state as well as the media. Vast expanse of land is being snatched away by large corporations in the name of development through mining and setting up of colossal industrial units resulting in displacement of millions of people. The total wealth generated by such industrial enterprise is shared between the promoters and the state most disproportionately in the approximate ratio of 90:10 (in the form of revenue received through taxes and royalty). Only 3 to 4% of the wealth accrued to the promoters cascade downwards. The state, as such, who is assigned with the duty of protecting its citizenry by statute, works in joint venture with the promoters of these large corporations to protect their interests by validating their objectives, aims, and methods to achieve such objectives and aims in the names of development and growth. The fact is systemic impoverishment, malnourishment and neglect have combined together to form such an intense envelope of darkness in the mineral and timber rich districts of India that it is beyond imagination today to work out a roadmap for reconciliation between the 2 sides. Do we have any elected representative who has the imagination to suggest a workable methodology to the tribals to continue with their movement non-violently in an atmosphere where private armies and state agencies in cohort run the writ or to halt the locomotion of these armies and agencies? What does a tribal want? First: she does not want to give away her land (the track record of rehabilitation in India is abjectly poor); second: she wants means of livelihood so that she is able to earn food, shelter and clothing for her and her family; third: she aspires to get access to healthcare, water and education to be able to lead a dignified life. But when you are driven away from your own land against your wish you become a hapless migrant. Your chances of survival become minimal. So the tribal today is involved in a bloody battle not to get thrown away from her own land. How does one do it non-violently in the face of these powerful armies and agencies? The large corporations also invest huge sums of money in getting parliamentarians elected so that legislations are made in their favor. Is there any parliamentarian to take up the case based on merits and objective analysis and reasoning and whose imagination is not rooted to the wants and desires of the promoters of large corporations? I feel utterly sorry for the foot soldiers of the state (and the large corporations it sets out to protect) who inundate the jungles, kill tribals and die at their hands; they essentially prowl under-prepared and of course, without knowing the implicit objectives, and have been unleashed on the people most dangerously by their masters. The irony is: People who mask their true interests in the garb of circuitous discussions on democracy, nationalism, and denouncing the use of violence (when it comes to common men having taken up arms against the state in desperation) are neither aware of the scale of hunger and desperation that is fuelling this war nor are they sensitive and sincere to their foot soldiers (on whose account they shed tears in TV studios) who have been (literally) thrown into the battlefields without adequate food, shelter, water, mosquito repellents, arms and ammunitions, and above all, a clear-cut strategy. I have another question to ask: Will violence be in the long term interest of the tribals? I think, no. Violence will help them to retaliate and protect themselves in the short term, but it will end up undermining the political battle against the dictatorship of the rich (landlords and large corporations put together) embedded in the idea of democracy as practiced in India. Secondly, violent politics is most likely to be criminalized in the long run. Bhagat Singh’s strategic use of violence was political (as it was being played with an audience around it) and not prophylactic; Gandhi’s strategic use of non-violence was political too and it arose from within the politics of the trusteeship of the rich and the leisured class; violence used by the tribals is retaliatory and prophylactic and is essentially devoid of politics. How does one bring the human civilization back to the idea that its survival rests in the ecological survival of all communities including every constituent of the biosphere? For this we have to move away from industrial economics and the idea of modernity that multiplies consumption and brings every ambit of our existence under commercial laws; go back to our lands and sources of water to live in farming communities without the polluted idea of adding too much to nature in our lifespan in the name of wealth generation.
- How would you react if a non-celebrity status Indian woman was to fall in love with a Pakistani man or vice versa? What kind of a man marries on phone? What kind of a sports-star marries a woman without seeing her face? What kind of a woman keeps her clothes (dipped in her man’s fluids) unwashed and stacked securely for years? What kind of a woman gets engaged to her childhood sweetheart (publicly and pompously); breaks off her engagement in a few months time (again publicly and pompously); and then after a short break announces her marriage to another man [well, a falling sports icon this time from another country but settled in a different country] (once again publicly and pompously)?
- Have you read the Koran? Polygamy as described in the Koran has a background context to it of the gory holy-war; it is very different from institutionalized polygamy as enshrined in the Muslim Personal Laws. Divorce by utterance (even in sense) does not find approval in the Koran. However, these are the 2 issues on which the Koran is denigrated by its religious opponents, very wrongly and ignorantly according to me.
- IPL is plush with funds. Where is this money coming from; who are the real investors? Who is earning, and how much? IPL is the crucible for showcasing of advertisements, and creating an engine for selling and pumping of multifarious products and services in the marketplace. As such, there was a need to showcase it as a huge carnival, bonanza and razzmatazz, where stars from the movie industry work as front men for investors: it is a cocktail of money, movies and a popular sport where the needs of the sportsmen fared last. Forget Kochi and Pune; Kings X1 Punjab (which is likely to come last in IPL 3) is valued now at Rs. 1000 crores: 3 to 4 times more than that of what it was bought at 3 years back. Where do you get such astronomical returns for underperformance? Which means, price of a team in IPL is not proportional to its performance; well, this contradicts the fundamental principle of free market economics! UP, Uttarakhand, MP, Chattisgarh, Bihar, Jharkhand, West Bengal and the whole of North East has 1 team: Kolkata Knight Riders. Maharashtra has 2 teams; all the 4 Southern states have 1 team each; the North has 3 teams. What does this show? IPL is consolidating and underlining the already existing biases in India: that between regions; classes; and, privileges.
- Tiger Woods is an exceptional sportsman: his career built on passion and hard work. Unfortunately, he was made into a pseudo-cultural icon once again by the biggest multi-national corporations by fabricating (in many cases suitably exaggerating) stories around him: rags to riches; racial discrimination; doting father; doting husband; and, his political and religious correctness. The agenda was simple: Such conformist guys sell products and services much better than brigands like, Muhammad Ali and George Best. Once, Tiger Woods’ personal life was exposed to the hilt (I sympathize with him), the same corporations lost no time in abandoning him. Meanwhile, the bosses found out one thing: The investments made on Tiger Woods have been astronomical and he cannot go scot-free. So, they will take him back once again, when the stories of his sexual transgressions fade from public memory (on which the media at the behest of these corporations has already started working). I think in the next 3 to 6 months time you will find the Tiger is back on the billboards. Conservatism in politics, religious beliefs, and cultural positioning works to the advantage of commercial corporations.
Is there a way to move forward or have we been irrevocably entangled in a downward helix of self-annihilation of the human race?
Yesterday I saw a wonderful film: Paul Greengrass’s Green Zone – US Army on their deceitful trail to find WMDs in Iraq and they ended up finding none!!!
Thursday, April 1, 2010
Some Recent Thoughts
1.
In Bharatpur bird sanctuary I came to know of two things. One, there is a specific variety of birds that pick on the teeth of tigers. A tiger having had a dense meal sits leisurely, possibly drooling, with its teeth open to the sky. These birds come and sit on the tiger’s mouth and feed on the tiny morsels of meat stuck between the spaces of its teeth. So, this results in two things: the cleaning of the tiger’s teeth and feeding of the hungry bird. Second, woodpeckers peck on tree stems in search of food like ants and insects of variety, resulting in creation of warm labyrinths, which are then enjoyed as homes by parakeets.
Nature has devised wonderful complimentary patterns of survival that hints at the fundamental grammar of melody and ethic.
2.
If rape (in the sexual context) is defined as sexual assault and act of hostile intercourse against the wishes of another person, how then can rape be gender specific? But the problem is: it is hardly defined in a gender neutral manner! It is always meant to be an act of sexual aggression by men on women. Rights activists argue that a man can never be raped; at the most he can be sexually harassed. What about men being sodomized by men and transvestites, and transvestites and eunuchs by men? Because men have disproportionate power in the realm of the real world compared to what women have, hence acts of all kinds of aggression (including rape) on women by men will of course outnumber similar acts on men by women. Further, the rape of a man is likely to be least reported in the present context because involving in a sexual act is seen to be macho behavior (and, men do not enjoy being projected un-macho because that’s just so un-cool!) and as such, shying away from sexual activity (where opportunity permits) is seen to be cloaking oneself ungainfully with feminine traits. I have listened to many stories where the men had to be involved unwillingly in sexual intercourse with their wives (yes wives!) to demonstrate: their interest in marriage and their partners, and their ability to perform; they were threatened by their powerful wives (on account of having more access to wealth and accompanying beauty in most of these cases) that otherwise they would face desertion and public humiliation of the worst kind. In such cases, these men have reported to have felt the very act of getting aroused excruciatingly tormenting. This is not rape but not very different from rape either.
Although, I do agree that men cannot be physically or emotionally bruised or violated or put to risk to the extent a woman can be in an act of rape.
While rape laws should be written considering the existential realities arising out of the enormously disproportionate gap in power between men and women in every sector of our society, however, there is every reason to alter the gender specificity of the act of rape in its literal meaning: just because it is not true.
3.
Children rob you of your basic freedom to rebel. In this context children are seen to be obfuscation or an impediment to ones individuality whether they are born to a plan or by default. I know of innumerable incidents where parents have abandoned their children both under impoverished as well as privileged conditions for multifarious reasons. There are situations akin to abandonment even in cases where the parent might not have left the family physically. I must add: I have also met parents who have gone out of families due to discord with their partners, and yet have been very dutiful to and protective of their children.
I have often wondered about the possible incentives in abandoning your children (although considering respectfully that in all the cases it must have been a very painful experience for the parent). There is of course the life of Buddha in search of truth having abandoned his family and kingdom. It is complicated but the life of Buddha (specifically his act of abandonment) can be viewed in many ways. Parents, who abandon, in most of the cases, alter their memory to find an underlying justification to abandon to unburden the weight of guilt that sits on their soul like a monster. The souls of children get mauled in the process of abandonment for they do not understand and their vulnerability, both emotional and physical, alters their understanding of life and existence.
There is a violent world prowling around us.
If we have children it is ethically incumbent on us to protect them from the shadows of this ever-increasing violence, and try to help them grow as fine individuals.
4.
There is so much talk all around about the reforms in the modern education system. But nobody in power seems to be talking about reducing the burden: both in terms of the number of subjects and the constituent syllabus, especially up to high school. Education is no longer contemplative and is not aimed towards sharpening our faculties to understand and realize. Education must help us to observe the universe and our lives with sensitivity and humor, and must help us to think and question. But that is not the aim of the education industry and mafia for sure! I want to write about this in greater detail sometime later. To end may I say: The examinations per se are not bad but the format is?
In Bharatpur bird sanctuary I came to know of two things. One, there is a specific variety of birds that pick on the teeth of tigers. A tiger having had a dense meal sits leisurely, possibly drooling, with its teeth open to the sky. These birds come and sit on the tiger’s mouth and feed on the tiny morsels of meat stuck between the spaces of its teeth. So, this results in two things: the cleaning of the tiger’s teeth and feeding of the hungry bird. Second, woodpeckers peck on tree stems in search of food like ants and insects of variety, resulting in creation of warm labyrinths, which are then enjoyed as homes by parakeets.
Nature has devised wonderful complimentary patterns of survival that hints at the fundamental grammar of melody and ethic.
2.
If rape (in the sexual context) is defined as sexual assault and act of hostile intercourse against the wishes of another person, how then can rape be gender specific? But the problem is: it is hardly defined in a gender neutral manner! It is always meant to be an act of sexual aggression by men on women. Rights activists argue that a man can never be raped; at the most he can be sexually harassed. What about men being sodomized by men and transvestites, and transvestites and eunuchs by men? Because men have disproportionate power in the realm of the real world compared to what women have, hence acts of all kinds of aggression (including rape) on women by men will of course outnumber similar acts on men by women. Further, the rape of a man is likely to be least reported in the present context because involving in a sexual act is seen to be macho behavior (and, men do not enjoy being projected un-macho because that’s just so un-cool!) and as such, shying away from sexual activity (where opportunity permits) is seen to be cloaking oneself ungainfully with feminine traits. I have listened to many stories where the men had to be involved unwillingly in sexual intercourse with their wives (yes wives!) to demonstrate: their interest in marriage and their partners, and their ability to perform; they were threatened by their powerful wives (on account of having more access to wealth and accompanying beauty in most of these cases) that otherwise they would face desertion and public humiliation of the worst kind. In such cases, these men have reported to have felt the very act of getting aroused excruciatingly tormenting. This is not rape but not very different from rape either.
Although, I do agree that men cannot be physically or emotionally bruised or violated or put to risk to the extent a woman can be in an act of rape.
While rape laws should be written considering the existential realities arising out of the enormously disproportionate gap in power between men and women in every sector of our society, however, there is every reason to alter the gender specificity of the act of rape in its literal meaning: just because it is not true.
3.
Children rob you of your basic freedom to rebel. In this context children are seen to be obfuscation or an impediment to ones individuality whether they are born to a plan or by default. I know of innumerable incidents where parents have abandoned their children both under impoverished as well as privileged conditions for multifarious reasons. There are situations akin to abandonment even in cases where the parent might not have left the family physically. I must add: I have also met parents who have gone out of families due to discord with their partners, and yet have been very dutiful to and protective of their children.
I have often wondered about the possible incentives in abandoning your children (although considering respectfully that in all the cases it must have been a very painful experience for the parent). There is of course the life of Buddha in search of truth having abandoned his family and kingdom. It is complicated but the life of Buddha (specifically his act of abandonment) can be viewed in many ways. Parents, who abandon, in most of the cases, alter their memory to find an underlying justification to abandon to unburden the weight of guilt that sits on their soul like a monster. The souls of children get mauled in the process of abandonment for they do not understand and their vulnerability, both emotional and physical, alters their understanding of life and existence.
There is a violent world prowling around us.
If we have children it is ethically incumbent on us to protect them from the shadows of this ever-increasing violence, and try to help them grow as fine individuals.
4.
There is so much talk all around about the reforms in the modern education system. But nobody in power seems to be talking about reducing the burden: both in terms of the number of subjects and the constituent syllabus, especially up to high school. Education is no longer contemplative and is not aimed towards sharpening our faculties to understand and realize. Education must help us to observe the universe and our lives with sensitivity and humor, and must help us to think and question. But that is not the aim of the education industry and mafia for sure! I want to write about this in greater detail sometime later. To end may I say: The examinations per se are not bad but the format is?
Friday, March 5, 2010
Psalm 23
Human soul is a cloud of confusion and contradictions. There is no straight-cut formula, approach or ideology that will help us decipher it. The randomness of the human soul and consciousness is the biggest challenge to the human civilization.
Art, literature and entrepreneurship over the years have thrown immense light on the strange workings of the human soul and consciousness. What can you conclude having read the Anna Karenina or the countless theological and literary interpretations of the Feast of Sacrifice (Binding of Isaac or Binding of Ishmael) or the enigmatic questions of life and death in the Upanishads or Meursault’s journey in the Outsider or Amal’s fall into the silence of death in the Dakghar or having traveled through the majestic trappings of the Walt Disney’s empire? We can simply conclude: It is nearly impossible to conclude.
There is a rational engine embedded in our soul and consciousness that helps us to understand the universe and our existence, and take decisions for ourselves in order to survive according to our aspirations and circumstances. At the same time, there rests an amorphous wave in the unseen quarters of our soul and consciousness that makes us realize that in each phenomenon that we encounter or know of, there are other traits that travel through the discovered laws, repetitions and patterns like transversals of sudden lightning, which are not easily subject to reasoned analysis.
Recently I sensed a conflict in my own soul: While in real life I am not given to mysticism or spirituality (in fact, I shun them and in public forums argue against them being aware of the havoc such things create on gullible people), there lies a deep longing within to surrender and submit to an ‘enlightened soul’. If taken forward, this could extend to the point of giving up my Self to this ‘enlightened soul’ (could be a theological or political or corporate ideologue); this would as a corollary relieve me of the critical stresses that modern life generates because of its omnipotent commercialization and hyper-consumption and end up reducing me to a vegetable where I am no longer required to take any decisions about myself but follow a path that is laid out for me.
In a way, the conflicting strains are between the rigors of decisive action and the longing to be a renunciate.
The challenge is: How to stay away from dogma in participating in both the experiences – the path of natural science and the tunnel of metaphysics; it is also important to know that a complete path is one that can contain both the experiences.
Somebody who does not know me well asked me a few days back: What do I read when I am despairing? Actually, nothing came to my mind, so I ended up saying: Well, sometimes I read the Psalm 23. The questioner practically frowned at me; he said: And, your friends say that you are an atheist!
I kept quiet not knowing what to reply.
The Psalm 23 is given below; you may read it if you wish to.
The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He makes me to lie down in green pastures; He leads me beside the still waters.
He restores my soul; He leads me in the paths of righteousness For His name’s sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death; I will fear no evil; For You are with me; Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me.
You prepare a table before me in presence of my enemies; You anoint my head with oil; My cup runs over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me All the days of my life; And I will dwell in the house of the Lord Forever.
Art, literature and entrepreneurship over the years have thrown immense light on the strange workings of the human soul and consciousness. What can you conclude having read the Anna Karenina or the countless theological and literary interpretations of the Feast of Sacrifice (Binding of Isaac or Binding of Ishmael) or the enigmatic questions of life and death in the Upanishads or Meursault’s journey in the Outsider or Amal’s fall into the silence of death in the Dakghar or having traveled through the majestic trappings of the Walt Disney’s empire? We can simply conclude: It is nearly impossible to conclude.
There is a rational engine embedded in our soul and consciousness that helps us to understand the universe and our existence, and take decisions for ourselves in order to survive according to our aspirations and circumstances. At the same time, there rests an amorphous wave in the unseen quarters of our soul and consciousness that makes us realize that in each phenomenon that we encounter or know of, there are other traits that travel through the discovered laws, repetitions and patterns like transversals of sudden lightning, which are not easily subject to reasoned analysis.
Recently I sensed a conflict in my own soul: While in real life I am not given to mysticism or spirituality (in fact, I shun them and in public forums argue against them being aware of the havoc such things create on gullible people), there lies a deep longing within to surrender and submit to an ‘enlightened soul’. If taken forward, this could extend to the point of giving up my Self to this ‘enlightened soul’ (could be a theological or political or corporate ideologue); this would as a corollary relieve me of the critical stresses that modern life generates because of its omnipotent commercialization and hyper-consumption and end up reducing me to a vegetable where I am no longer required to take any decisions about myself but follow a path that is laid out for me.
In a way, the conflicting strains are between the rigors of decisive action and the longing to be a renunciate.
The challenge is: How to stay away from dogma in participating in both the experiences – the path of natural science and the tunnel of metaphysics; it is also important to know that a complete path is one that can contain both the experiences.
Somebody who does not know me well asked me a few days back: What do I read when I am despairing? Actually, nothing came to my mind, so I ended up saying: Well, sometimes I read the Psalm 23. The questioner practically frowned at me; he said: And, your friends say that you are an atheist!
I kept quiet not knowing what to reply.
The Psalm 23 is given below; you may read it if you wish to.
The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He makes me to lie down in green pastures; He leads me beside the still waters.
He restores my soul; He leads me in the paths of righteousness For His name’s sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death; I will fear no evil; For You are with me; Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me.
You prepare a table before me in presence of my enemies; You anoint my head with oil; My cup runs over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me All the days of my life; And I will dwell in the house of the Lord Forever.
Friday, February 12, 2010
Chasing
(A long story-poem written in 3 chapters of free verse)
1.
The true art is in the art of chasing not ideas or dreams,
But people who interest you all of a sudden at street corners,
At railway stations, at ice cream parlors, at grocery shops, at libraries,
And graveyards, inside hospital lobbies, so on and so forth.
What draws you closer to them,
Could be the strains of mist in their eyes,
The waves on their hair,
The incongruent stains of food on their shirts,
Or, even the dogged hunch of their backs.
2.
I have mastered this art over the years.
A few years back on a sunny winter afternoon,
I was eating a chicken cutlet at a street joint near Shyambazar crossing.
These are times when I become an obsessively self possessed man,
Almost severed from the rest of the world;
The pleasures of eating street food are such!
When I was devouring the last morsel of this giant cutlet,
Deeply immersed in a happy reverie,
I caught the sight of a hapless man (from the edge of my eyes),
Standing a few yards away from me,
Eating something that looked like a well done fish fry,
Inanely gaping elsewhere at a spiraling vortex of darkness unfolding,
Non-existent to normal eyes like mine.
What struck me was his spiritual distance from the delicacy that he was eating!
Having chased this man through the length and the breadth of the city,
Crossing its densely populated and abandoned avenues,
Streets and labyrinths during days and nights, across seasons and storms,
Rising buildings and heaps of debris,
Following him inside shops, restaurants, malls and cinema halls,
The strange scents of my pursuit still linger in my mind.
On foot, on bus, on local train and underground train,
On boat and on rickshaw and auto-rickshaw,
The story of this man was revealed to me,
As riddles start unlocking in dreams ending with more complex riddles to solve.
The story goes like this:
The man belonged to a family of grocers in the laid-back town of Malda,
He had inherited a decent store in the downtown supermarket,
He had a well cut-out life like his other two brothers,
Who had inherited similar stores like him in the city markets.
He obviously had other plans,
He wanted to build a factory for kites.
His understanding of aerodynamics was phenomenal,
In school, he had become a legend as a kite-maker and a kite-flyer.
One evening while returning from his secret workshop where,
He experimented with kites of different shapes and sizes,
He saw a lovely woman with radiant skin and a wondrous face,
In a lane that was barely illuminated by the lights of advertisement boards,
Displaying soaps, iodized salt and digital watches.
As soon as he saw this woman embedded in a world of her own,
Whom he thought to be a ball of magical light,
He knew his life was soon to meet a decisive change.
He followed this woman at a safe distance,
She taught English at the Evergreen Coaching Class.
The next few days he locked himself up in a room,
Meticulously planning how to make a move at her.
Ten days later, the face of this woman still playing on his mind,
He sat in the cash-counter of his grocery shop,
Reluctant, absent-minded, unsure and unaware of a concrete plan,
When this woman walked into his shop to buy three bars of Liril.
You can imagine the crescendo of his happy heart beating,
Facing this woman from such a close distance.
He took charge of the transaction with shivering legs,
The two things that made our man go crazy with longing,
Were the softness of this woman’s honey colored skin,
And the luminescence of her eyes.
After she paid the cash and took the bars of soap,
She spent a few seconds looking at the other things behind the cash-counter:
Deodorants, shampoos, multiple grain biscuits, basmati rice packs,
Colorful pouches of pepper and spices and likewise,
Then she turned back and made a move to exit the store.
The man said something almost inaudible and quivering to her:
Do you like kites?
She looked at the man, pleasant clouds swimming in her eyes
She replied to him in English: Are you telling me something?
Yes, I’m saying: Do you like kites?
Of course, I like kites and my brother likes them even more!
The man brought out two colossal kites with frills and laces:
One done in red and black in the shape of the face of a monster,
And the other a green and blue one in the shape of a mango.
Giving her these kites ceremoniously, hiding his embarrassment he said:
These kites come free with three bars of Liril from the store owner,
And these are designed by me.
The happiness the woman felt at this grand gesture is difficult to describe;
Once she had taken the kites with her,
She looked at him more closely (although hiding her scrutiny intelligently);
She was overwhelmed by her mounting desire.
The next two years were years of sunshine,
Devoted to a pair of wild lovers who met,
In the mornings and nights unseen to society,
In the kite-maker’s workshop to pour,
The warmth of their longing in each others bodies and souls,
Everyday without a break.
What struck the man about this woman was:
She loved her body to the point of being shamelessly selfish,
And openly enjoyed the act of making love to him,
Demanding all the manipulations of pleasure,
Which he thought were tricks of fallen women and whores.
This unnerved him for some time;
Later he came to terms with it concluding,
That all her acts were endeavors to heighten his pleasure;
These were true signs of sacrifice that a woman in love could do for her man.
Needless to say: He was unconvinced by his own logic,
He remained constantly smitten by bouts of angry jealousy,
Emanating from his belief that she had enjoyed innumerable men before she met him.
The woman loved his acts of jealousy,
And did nothing substantially to douse his fire.
A few facts here:
This woman came from an English educated Brahmin family,
The man came from a family of traders with very little formal education,
And he was seven years younger to her.
These became terrible obfuscations to a proposal of marriage from either side,
She was married off all of a sudden to a doctor in Calcutta in the third year.
A friend of this man, who was invited to the marriage,
Had been going up and down the town circulating news like:
The bridegroom is a FRCP from Edinburgh,
Tall and good-looking, almost dashing like an actor in a Hollywood movie,
And the couple looked shrouded in a thick blanket of bliss and happiness,
Whenever they were together.
Our man was gradually destroyed,
Almost decimated in the next three years,
With the acuteness of love pains which struck every organ of his body,
Most importantly, his brain,
Falling deeper in a ravenous depthless pit each day.
One fine morning he decided to make a journey to the city of Calcutta,
(Which had become Kolkata by this time) and come face-to-face,
With this woman and talk to her for the last time;
For he had three questions to ask.
He was sure this was the only way to heal his oozing wounds;
The questions were idiotic and sentimental to say the least:
Were you happy with me?
Are you happy now?
Why did you break my heart?
The point is: The woman was happy in her marital life!
Why did she do what she did:
This question of course flamed in my mind.
It’s difficult to answer this,
I found no clues to it but I’ve an answer:
The man was inconsequential to her in the real sense,
She wanted a settled and a secure life for herself,
But before she could attain it she secretly wished to avenge,
Her disciplinarian and righteous upbringing,
By breaking free for a few intervening years,
And taste the unfettered shadows of life that true love transports with it.
This man that I chased was far from getting healed,
Observing the happiness of a warm home,
Where his lover was the queen surrounded by her children and husband,
The situation had ignited a dark passion in the deep quarters of his soul.
One winter morning swimming gaily in the river Hooghly,
He must have planned to shoot her on a new moon night,
For it was after this bath that,
His actions of accessing the gun market had become most decisive.
I was a witness to the murder,
I was spellbound by his commitment to the act.
After killing her and seeing her fall limply on the marble floor of her bedroom,
In front of a teak-wood paneled florally carved box,
He laughed for the first time since I had seen him on that sunny winter afternoon.
He felt relieved, ready to be taken,
His body faintly lit by the light of celestial bodies in an otherwise dark night.
3.
I chase women too,
I had started chasing my wife (well, she was not my wife then),
By the side of a dry fruit store in a shopping mall on a misty spring evening.
What had struck me was the deep melancholy,
Rising from her eyes like steam and the beauty of her softness.
She told me once which makes me worry quite a lot:
I must wear some cosmetics darling at least to show to the others,
That I’m happy with you.
I argued against cosmetics in social forums quite successfully;
But I was getting defeated hands down by the logic that cosmetics
Could beam somebody’s inner happiness as if it had no light of its own.
We fought over this so hard that we ended up making love.
There are nights when my wife lives with her mother,
And I am left all alone in the house to fend for myself,
I get up in the nights sleeplessly and wonder through the house,
With lovelorn thoughts of her hovering dangerously in my mind.
This is when I go to her wardrobe and light it up,
As my sight travels over her perfumes, lavender, moisturizers,
Creams, skin foundations, talcum, nail-polishes,
And lip-smacks in the finest bottles of glass and metal,
Adorning the trays and empty spaces of fine cut wood,
I can sense the loneliness that I feel without her,
And the aching feeling of how much I want to make her mine.
My room gets flooded with a spray of smoke,
And I can see a simmering image of her in the mirror,
From where she looks at me with pure desire.
1.
The true art is in the art of chasing not ideas or dreams,
But people who interest you all of a sudden at street corners,
At railway stations, at ice cream parlors, at grocery shops, at libraries,
And graveyards, inside hospital lobbies, so on and so forth.
What draws you closer to them,
Could be the strains of mist in their eyes,
The waves on their hair,
The incongruent stains of food on their shirts,
Or, even the dogged hunch of their backs.
2.
I have mastered this art over the years.
A few years back on a sunny winter afternoon,
I was eating a chicken cutlet at a street joint near Shyambazar crossing.
These are times when I become an obsessively self possessed man,
Almost severed from the rest of the world;
The pleasures of eating street food are such!
When I was devouring the last morsel of this giant cutlet,
Deeply immersed in a happy reverie,
I caught the sight of a hapless man (from the edge of my eyes),
Standing a few yards away from me,
Eating something that looked like a well done fish fry,
Inanely gaping elsewhere at a spiraling vortex of darkness unfolding,
Non-existent to normal eyes like mine.
What struck me was his spiritual distance from the delicacy that he was eating!
Having chased this man through the length and the breadth of the city,
Crossing its densely populated and abandoned avenues,
Streets and labyrinths during days and nights, across seasons and storms,
Rising buildings and heaps of debris,
Following him inside shops, restaurants, malls and cinema halls,
The strange scents of my pursuit still linger in my mind.
On foot, on bus, on local train and underground train,
On boat and on rickshaw and auto-rickshaw,
The story of this man was revealed to me,
As riddles start unlocking in dreams ending with more complex riddles to solve.
The story goes like this:
The man belonged to a family of grocers in the laid-back town of Malda,
He had inherited a decent store in the downtown supermarket,
He had a well cut-out life like his other two brothers,
Who had inherited similar stores like him in the city markets.
He obviously had other plans,
He wanted to build a factory for kites.
His understanding of aerodynamics was phenomenal,
In school, he had become a legend as a kite-maker and a kite-flyer.
One evening while returning from his secret workshop where,
He experimented with kites of different shapes and sizes,
He saw a lovely woman with radiant skin and a wondrous face,
In a lane that was barely illuminated by the lights of advertisement boards,
Displaying soaps, iodized salt and digital watches.
As soon as he saw this woman embedded in a world of her own,
Whom he thought to be a ball of magical light,
He knew his life was soon to meet a decisive change.
He followed this woman at a safe distance,
She taught English at the Evergreen Coaching Class.
The next few days he locked himself up in a room,
Meticulously planning how to make a move at her.
Ten days later, the face of this woman still playing on his mind,
He sat in the cash-counter of his grocery shop,
Reluctant, absent-minded, unsure and unaware of a concrete plan,
When this woman walked into his shop to buy three bars of Liril.
You can imagine the crescendo of his happy heart beating,
Facing this woman from such a close distance.
He took charge of the transaction with shivering legs,
The two things that made our man go crazy with longing,
Were the softness of this woman’s honey colored skin,
And the luminescence of her eyes.
After she paid the cash and took the bars of soap,
She spent a few seconds looking at the other things behind the cash-counter:
Deodorants, shampoos, multiple grain biscuits, basmati rice packs,
Colorful pouches of pepper and spices and likewise,
Then she turned back and made a move to exit the store.
The man said something almost inaudible and quivering to her:
Do you like kites?
She looked at the man, pleasant clouds swimming in her eyes
She replied to him in English: Are you telling me something?
Yes, I’m saying: Do you like kites?
Of course, I like kites and my brother likes them even more!
The man brought out two colossal kites with frills and laces:
One done in red and black in the shape of the face of a monster,
And the other a green and blue one in the shape of a mango.
Giving her these kites ceremoniously, hiding his embarrassment he said:
These kites come free with three bars of Liril from the store owner,
And these are designed by me.
The happiness the woman felt at this grand gesture is difficult to describe;
Once she had taken the kites with her,
She looked at him more closely (although hiding her scrutiny intelligently);
She was overwhelmed by her mounting desire.
The next two years were years of sunshine,
Devoted to a pair of wild lovers who met,
In the mornings and nights unseen to society,
In the kite-maker’s workshop to pour,
The warmth of their longing in each others bodies and souls,
Everyday without a break.
What struck the man about this woman was:
She loved her body to the point of being shamelessly selfish,
And openly enjoyed the act of making love to him,
Demanding all the manipulations of pleasure,
Which he thought were tricks of fallen women and whores.
This unnerved him for some time;
Later he came to terms with it concluding,
That all her acts were endeavors to heighten his pleasure;
These were true signs of sacrifice that a woman in love could do for her man.
Needless to say: He was unconvinced by his own logic,
He remained constantly smitten by bouts of angry jealousy,
Emanating from his belief that she had enjoyed innumerable men before she met him.
The woman loved his acts of jealousy,
And did nothing substantially to douse his fire.
A few facts here:
This woman came from an English educated Brahmin family,
The man came from a family of traders with very little formal education,
And he was seven years younger to her.
These became terrible obfuscations to a proposal of marriage from either side,
She was married off all of a sudden to a doctor in Calcutta in the third year.
A friend of this man, who was invited to the marriage,
Had been going up and down the town circulating news like:
The bridegroom is a FRCP from Edinburgh,
Tall and good-looking, almost dashing like an actor in a Hollywood movie,
And the couple looked shrouded in a thick blanket of bliss and happiness,
Whenever they were together.
Our man was gradually destroyed,
Almost decimated in the next three years,
With the acuteness of love pains which struck every organ of his body,
Most importantly, his brain,
Falling deeper in a ravenous depthless pit each day.
One fine morning he decided to make a journey to the city of Calcutta,
(Which had become Kolkata by this time) and come face-to-face,
With this woman and talk to her for the last time;
For he had three questions to ask.
He was sure this was the only way to heal his oozing wounds;
The questions were idiotic and sentimental to say the least:
Were you happy with me?
Are you happy now?
Why did you break my heart?
The point is: The woman was happy in her marital life!
Why did she do what she did:
This question of course flamed in my mind.
It’s difficult to answer this,
I found no clues to it but I’ve an answer:
The man was inconsequential to her in the real sense,
She wanted a settled and a secure life for herself,
But before she could attain it she secretly wished to avenge,
Her disciplinarian and righteous upbringing,
By breaking free for a few intervening years,
And taste the unfettered shadows of life that true love transports with it.
This man that I chased was far from getting healed,
Observing the happiness of a warm home,
Where his lover was the queen surrounded by her children and husband,
The situation had ignited a dark passion in the deep quarters of his soul.
One winter morning swimming gaily in the river Hooghly,
He must have planned to shoot her on a new moon night,
For it was after this bath that,
His actions of accessing the gun market had become most decisive.
I was a witness to the murder,
I was spellbound by his commitment to the act.
After killing her and seeing her fall limply on the marble floor of her bedroom,
In front of a teak-wood paneled florally carved box,
He laughed for the first time since I had seen him on that sunny winter afternoon.
He felt relieved, ready to be taken,
His body faintly lit by the light of celestial bodies in an otherwise dark night.
3.
I chase women too,
I had started chasing my wife (well, she was not my wife then),
By the side of a dry fruit store in a shopping mall on a misty spring evening.
What had struck me was the deep melancholy,
Rising from her eyes like steam and the beauty of her softness.
She told me once which makes me worry quite a lot:
I must wear some cosmetics darling at least to show to the others,
That I’m happy with you.
I argued against cosmetics in social forums quite successfully;
But I was getting defeated hands down by the logic that cosmetics
Could beam somebody’s inner happiness as if it had no light of its own.
We fought over this so hard that we ended up making love.
There are nights when my wife lives with her mother,
And I am left all alone in the house to fend for myself,
I get up in the nights sleeplessly and wonder through the house,
With lovelorn thoughts of her hovering dangerously in my mind.
This is when I go to her wardrobe and light it up,
As my sight travels over her perfumes, lavender, moisturizers,
Creams, skin foundations, talcum, nail-polishes,
And lip-smacks in the finest bottles of glass and metal,
Adorning the trays and empty spaces of fine cut wood,
I can sense the loneliness that I feel without her,
And the aching feeling of how much I want to make her mine.
My room gets flooded with a spray of smoke,
And I can see a simmering image of her in the mirror,
From where she looks at me with pure desire.
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
The Tower
(A long story-poem written in 6 chapters of free verse)
1.
The tower where we live is a tall and a lonely tower,
Standing outside the limits of the city.
It reaches into the white tufts of clouds
From a huge expanse of land once used for potato farming.
This tower among other towers has a name,
It is popular by its name: Dream Tower.
Sometimes I wonder about the dreams of this Dream Tower,
Dreams of its architect, dreams of the masons who worked on it,
Dreams of the seller and of the buyers of its apartments,
And of the mafia which craftily squeezed the land out of wide eyed farmers.
The tower stands erect like the timeless portal of an arrogant crown.
As I walk up its spinal stairwell at nights,
Pondering over this multitude of dreams, I know,
These are dreams which still linger in its labyrinths like ghosts.
2.
There are times when I stand at the window of my apartment,
Looking at the city where I was born.
Searching for symbols and patterns that I know exist,
Beneath layers of rising vapor in the air of this city.
The smog invariably clouds my vision.
Sometimes I catch a glimpse of familiar bridges and a few monuments.
Mostly I look at the airplanes taking off and landing incessantly,
And the cars that seem to glide on the highway that dives past the distant tower.
The farmlands and wetlands around the tower look plundered and ravaged,
Destroyed by the monstrous man made construction machinery,
Giving way to spectacular buildings, deluxe hotels and shopping malls.
I tell a lot of people (not caring to hide the strain of pride in my tone):
I live away from the city, amidst greenery and water bodies and clouds.
I know this is a lie; yet I prefer saying it,
It makes my acquisition look like a prize possession.
Soon the ever swelling concrete jungle will engulf everything;
The nooks and corners, the parks and shady grounds by the lakesides,
Where I chased solitary beautiful girls during winter picnics long time ago.
3.
I have a friend who is a film critic – progressive, well read,
And talkative on all the matters on earth;
I hope you understand what I mean.
This guy after eating a sumptuous meal at my place summed it up:
Sandy, this property makes you look like a man!
Men are no longer known for their chivalry,
Or, by the charming ways they treat their women.
Rather, when we talk of men coming back nowadays,
They are actually referring to sedans resembling angry war planes.
My friend’s words made me wistful for some time, and ponder:
Was I at all a man enough before taking my place in this tower?
4.
My son and daughter have wonderful faces like those fluffy angels in a dream.
I have been thinking: Can one see such dreams in this tower?
My wife who loves me like a magnificent queen,
And is my partner in all the crimes that I have committed till date,
Was the one who made all the installations in our home:
The wood carved fine leather upholstered furniture,
The ornate lighting, the embroidered carpets,
And the stainless steel digitized contraptions to do this and that to perfection.
My God, the things look so nice and cool,
And provide you with such deadly comfort,
That our home almost looks like the insides of a medieval fortress.
In this cave, at times floating on strange clouds, we play hide and seek,
Make fun of each other, quarrel, see horrendous films, listen to rock,
And sleep and eat and defecate and party, coming and going,
Coming and going, day in and day out.
Do we get bored in this tower? There is no definite way to tell you this,
Because when we get bored we skip channels, change our gym routine,
My wife orders for new food, we try out avant-garde stuff in films and theater,
Read poetry, and make love on different beds,
And even change drivers and servants.
One night – the stars and the half moon twinkled so brightly in the sky,
While the lights from the city looked sad and diffused –
I was teaching electrostatics to my children.
You must be aware how tough it is to teach adolescents,
Something like charging of a gold leaf electroscope by induction.
As I jumped into the most dramatic part of my discourse,
My daughter furrows her brow, raises her hand and blurts:
Sandy man, I’ve something to say.
Although I felt irritated to the core, but you know,
When this tiny fiery woman has something to say, you can’t stop her,
My son feels agitated and almost taking my side reacts sharply:
Come; say, what all you have to say quickly,
Don’t you see Sandy man is making such a bright effort?
Then my daughter asks me this question:
Tell us you Sandy man; how far is the soul of the city from our tower?
My son becomes thoughtful at the question and as a rejoinder asks:
How can one say, Sandy man, where the soul of a city lies?
Frankly, I feel like a charged electroscope and I end up saying:
The city is so far away from us and its soul, my dear children, lies buried
And if at all you want to find it, you need to unearth a prickly riddle.
At this point my wife makes her glorious entry into the scene and declares:
Sandy let us all go and live, by the side of a sinuating river,
You promised to build a cottage on an enchanted shore during our courtship.
Memory is something you are incapable of forgetting,
And I marvel at my queen’s memory,
With which she strikes me almost every time at the right hour.
The children start singing a meaningless song,
Boisterously breaking the dead silence of the night,
Amidst this increasing cacophony, my tigress gives me a look,
Which tells me she will fall in my ferocious embrace the moment,
I leave all this mess and catch her.
It happened just then,
Our tower took off into the sky like a rocket!
5.
When we do not feel like sleeping which happens many a time;
I tell them: stories, mostly spooky stories.
I told them one a few nights back:
I got down from my car, proceeded towards the elevator well in the tower,
The tower consists of two elevator wells facing each other.
(We are the only residents in this tower).
Both the elevator cubicles were waiting tirelessly at ground zero,
For somebody to occupy their space.
I feel very confused about which elevator to board,
So I have made a principle of sorts:
While descending I will drive down the southern well,
Whereas on my way to the top I will drive up the northern well.
I board the northern cubicle, hungry and tired but happy to be back home.
The doors of my elevator close making an unpleasant sound,
And I push the button for my floor.
My eyes by fleeting chance fall on the opposite elevator with doors shut;
It looks utterly glum and is melancholically illuminated by its fluorescent lamp,
It’s vacant and at rest; I find in it a ball of smoke encircling like the ring of Saturn.
As my elevator kick starts and rushes upwards I find,
The opposite elevator rushing upwards all of a sudden almost at an equal speed.
When we race past each other through the intervening floors I can sight,
The other elevator momentarily through the glass panels of our respective doors:
The emerging ball of smoke growing inside its somnolent chamber,
Into something more concrete which I cannot readily grasp.
As we leave the sixth floor behind,
The ball of smoke was gone and instead I found a man,
Standing in a grotesque posture looking vacantly at me.
He hardly moved; his hungry gaze on me more intense with each passing floor.
Once we had crossed the tenth floor the other elevator accelerated,
And crossed mine leaving me terror struck and suddenly I realized,
That this man almost looked like me (he was my body double),
Wore the same clothes and carried the same bag and file of papers;
It was this mesmerizing similarity that filled my soul with endless darkness.
Was this man a heinous imposter?
Was this man a terrorist?
Would he harm my wife and children?
At last, I reached the floor where I live,
My chest thumping and heaving against my frail rib cage.
My hands shook as I pressed the entrance bell,
A few seconds later, our maid had opened the door.
When she found me standing in front of the door,
She instinctively turned around and rushed inside calling for my wife.
When she was turning, I had glimpsed the shock in her eyes.
Surprisingly I did not enter or make any move,
As if I was waiting for approval of others to enter my own home.
My wife came and the children followed,
She came to the door; I saw a queer look in her eyes (the children looked awestruck).
When she spoke, she sounded restrained and withdrawn:
What a look alike, unbelievable!
Nobody can believe this.
My dear man, don’t harm us, my husband is back at home,
He has gone to the washroom to take his bath.
Tonight we will leave to see the mother of all rivers;
As you would know, it is a long and a tedious journey.
Spare us my good man,
If you need anything, anything from us I am willing to give,
If you want our home in this tower, you can have it,
We will be leaving for good.
6.
My wife belongs to lands where fables are written,
I snatched her from a fable and made her mine.
In doing so I made her the heroine of one fable,
And a vamp in another.
There are days when we go to the terrace of this tower,
Soaking sun in our burnt out bodies, standing taller
And looking breathlessly at the city,
Which feels like a crouching demon, inching towards us.
Will we feel like immigrants forever on this planet?
To douse our eternal fears we pray; we pray like devotees are required to pray.
We end all our prayers with one line:
Let this city keep some space for our children,
Whose faces resemble those fluffy angels in a dream!
1.
The tower where we live is a tall and a lonely tower,
Standing outside the limits of the city.
It reaches into the white tufts of clouds
From a huge expanse of land once used for potato farming.
This tower among other towers has a name,
It is popular by its name: Dream Tower.
Sometimes I wonder about the dreams of this Dream Tower,
Dreams of its architect, dreams of the masons who worked on it,
Dreams of the seller and of the buyers of its apartments,
And of the mafia which craftily squeezed the land out of wide eyed farmers.
The tower stands erect like the timeless portal of an arrogant crown.
As I walk up its spinal stairwell at nights,
Pondering over this multitude of dreams, I know,
These are dreams which still linger in its labyrinths like ghosts.
2.
There are times when I stand at the window of my apartment,
Looking at the city where I was born.
Searching for symbols and patterns that I know exist,
Beneath layers of rising vapor in the air of this city.
The smog invariably clouds my vision.
Sometimes I catch a glimpse of familiar bridges and a few monuments.
Mostly I look at the airplanes taking off and landing incessantly,
And the cars that seem to glide on the highway that dives past the distant tower.
The farmlands and wetlands around the tower look plundered and ravaged,
Destroyed by the monstrous man made construction machinery,
Giving way to spectacular buildings, deluxe hotels and shopping malls.
I tell a lot of people (not caring to hide the strain of pride in my tone):
I live away from the city, amidst greenery and water bodies and clouds.
I know this is a lie; yet I prefer saying it,
It makes my acquisition look like a prize possession.
Soon the ever swelling concrete jungle will engulf everything;
The nooks and corners, the parks and shady grounds by the lakesides,
Where I chased solitary beautiful girls during winter picnics long time ago.
3.
I have a friend who is a film critic – progressive, well read,
And talkative on all the matters on earth;
I hope you understand what I mean.
This guy after eating a sumptuous meal at my place summed it up:
Sandy, this property makes you look like a man!
Men are no longer known for their chivalry,
Or, by the charming ways they treat their women.
Rather, when we talk of men coming back nowadays,
They are actually referring to sedans resembling angry war planes.
My friend’s words made me wistful for some time, and ponder:
Was I at all a man enough before taking my place in this tower?
4.
My son and daughter have wonderful faces like those fluffy angels in a dream.
I have been thinking: Can one see such dreams in this tower?
My wife who loves me like a magnificent queen,
And is my partner in all the crimes that I have committed till date,
Was the one who made all the installations in our home:
The wood carved fine leather upholstered furniture,
The ornate lighting, the embroidered carpets,
And the stainless steel digitized contraptions to do this and that to perfection.
My God, the things look so nice and cool,
And provide you with such deadly comfort,
That our home almost looks like the insides of a medieval fortress.
In this cave, at times floating on strange clouds, we play hide and seek,
Make fun of each other, quarrel, see horrendous films, listen to rock,
And sleep and eat and defecate and party, coming and going,
Coming and going, day in and day out.
Do we get bored in this tower? There is no definite way to tell you this,
Because when we get bored we skip channels, change our gym routine,
My wife orders for new food, we try out avant-garde stuff in films and theater,
Read poetry, and make love on different beds,
And even change drivers and servants.
One night – the stars and the half moon twinkled so brightly in the sky,
While the lights from the city looked sad and diffused –
I was teaching electrostatics to my children.
You must be aware how tough it is to teach adolescents,
Something like charging of a gold leaf electroscope by induction.
As I jumped into the most dramatic part of my discourse,
My daughter furrows her brow, raises her hand and blurts:
Sandy man, I’ve something to say.
Although I felt irritated to the core, but you know,
When this tiny fiery woman has something to say, you can’t stop her,
My son feels agitated and almost taking my side reacts sharply:
Come; say, what all you have to say quickly,
Don’t you see Sandy man is making such a bright effort?
Then my daughter asks me this question:
Tell us you Sandy man; how far is the soul of the city from our tower?
My son becomes thoughtful at the question and as a rejoinder asks:
How can one say, Sandy man, where the soul of a city lies?
Frankly, I feel like a charged electroscope and I end up saying:
The city is so far away from us and its soul, my dear children, lies buried
And if at all you want to find it, you need to unearth a prickly riddle.
At this point my wife makes her glorious entry into the scene and declares:
Sandy let us all go and live, by the side of a sinuating river,
You promised to build a cottage on an enchanted shore during our courtship.
Memory is something you are incapable of forgetting,
And I marvel at my queen’s memory,
With which she strikes me almost every time at the right hour.
The children start singing a meaningless song,
Boisterously breaking the dead silence of the night,
Amidst this increasing cacophony, my tigress gives me a look,
Which tells me she will fall in my ferocious embrace the moment,
I leave all this mess and catch her.
It happened just then,
Our tower took off into the sky like a rocket!
5.
When we do not feel like sleeping which happens many a time;
I tell them: stories, mostly spooky stories.
I told them one a few nights back:
I got down from my car, proceeded towards the elevator well in the tower,
The tower consists of two elevator wells facing each other.
(We are the only residents in this tower).
Both the elevator cubicles were waiting tirelessly at ground zero,
For somebody to occupy their space.
I feel very confused about which elevator to board,
So I have made a principle of sorts:
While descending I will drive down the southern well,
Whereas on my way to the top I will drive up the northern well.
I board the northern cubicle, hungry and tired but happy to be back home.
The doors of my elevator close making an unpleasant sound,
And I push the button for my floor.
My eyes by fleeting chance fall on the opposite elevator with doors shut;
It looks utterly glum and is melancholically illuminated by its fluorescent lamp,
It’s vacant and at rest; I find in it a ball of smoke encircling like the ring of Saturn.
As my elevator kick starts and rushes upwards I find,
The opposite elevator rushing upwards all of a sudden almost at an equal speed.
When we race past each other through the intervening floors I can sight,
The other elevator momentarily through the glass panels of our respective doors:
The emerging ball of smoke growing inside its somnolent chamber,
Into something more concrete which I cannot readily grasp.
As we leave the sixth floor behind,
The ball of smoke was gone and instead I found a man,
Standing in a grotesque posture looking vacantly at me.
He hardly moved; his hungry gaze on me more intense with each passing floor.
Once we had crossed the tenth floor the other elevator accelerated,
And crossed mine leaving me terror struck and suddenly I realized,
That this man almost looked like me (he was my body double),
Wore the same clothes and carried the same bag and file of papers;
It was this mesmerizing similarity that filled my soul with endless darkness.
Was this man a heinous imposter?
Was this man a terrorist?
Would he harm my wife and children?
At last, I reached the floor where I live,
My chest thumping and heaving against my frail rib cage.
My hands shook as I pressed the entrance bell,
A few seconds later, our maid had opened the door.
When she found me standing in front of the door,
She instinctively turned around and rushed inside calling for my wife.
When she was turning, I had glimpsed the shock in her eyes.
Surprisingly I did not enter or make any move,
As if I was waiting for approval of others to enter my own home.
My wife came and the children followed,
She came to the door; I saw a queer look in her eyes (the children looked awestruck).
When she spoke, she sounded restrained and withdrawn:
What a look alike, unbelievable!
Nobody can believe this.
My dear man, don’t harm us, my husband is back at home,
He has gone to the washroom to take his bath.
Tonight we will leave to see the mother of all rivers;
As you would know, it is a long and a tedious journey.
Spare us my good man,
If you need anything, anything from us I am willing to give,
If you want our home in this tower, you can have it,
We will be leaving for good.
6.
My wife belongs to lands where fables are written,
I snatched her from a fable and made her mine.
In doing so I made her the heroine of one fable,
And a vamp in another.
There are days when we go to the terrace of this tower,
Soaking sun in our burnt out bodies, standing taller
And looking breathlessly at the city,
Which feels like a crouching demon, inching towards us.
Will we feel like immigrants forever on this planet?
To douse our eternal fears we pray; we pray like devotees are required to pray.
We end all our prayers with one line:
Let this city keep some space for our children,
Whose faces resemble those fluffy angels in a dream!
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