Saket Suryesh's Blog, page 28
May 12, 2013
Incoherent Thoughts on a Mother's Day
Mother son relation is the most secure relation..how can you ever doubt the umbilical cord which fed you when you could not feed yourself. It therefore fall with a thud when for a moment any doubt of lack of love creeps in. That is a thud which screams loud in the loneliest of the nights.
Men tend to make their spouse believe, early in their lives that they are no longer Momma's boy. They go to length to prove how their Mom's no longer hold the last word in their lives and decisions they are to make going forward.
This is a little conspiracy to prove that manhood has been gained and adulthood has been attained, and it is entirely untrue. As long as it stays a secret and is contained within the realm of the two original perpetrator and the lady being wooed, there is no problem. The fault line appears when it reaches then mother as well. It gets worse when she starts to protest and in a sense legitimises the claim which anyways was untrue. A man can never outgrow a mother's love. For a mother to believe anything like that and to protest that is detrimental to the relation.
All men, even the middle aged ones, live with a secret desire to get exposed of the lie which they tell to their wives. This is a lie which they want to be called out and it breaks their hearts if their mother believes in what it untrue and abandons them. No child is old enought to be abandoned by a mother. A child always loves to be prioritised and laughed off for his small slips..and for him all his slips are small..as far as the mother is concerned.
I don't know what I am writing, and it seems rubbish. It is incoherent and lacks design. But it is a Mother's Day and society crept between me and my mother, and drove a divide so deep that I could do nothing more than getting my daughter speak with the grandmother, on the Mother's Day. I wish she could never believe that son's love is lost and that societal correctness is a pre-condition of a mother's love for the child. Nothing can be a pre-condition of a mother's love. I wish she knows that even when I walk out of the home, I will always love her. And I wish she believes it, and believes it without requiring me to prove it.
Read it without prejudice..it is not a post, it is a wail of loneliness which travels to the skies. It comes from a life which is forlorn and tired and would do well with a mother's love. It is from the other son, who could not claim "Mere Paas Maa hai".
Men tend to make their spouse believe, early in their lives that they are no longer Momma's boy. They go to length to prove how their Mom's no longer hold the last word in their lives and decisions they are to make going forward.
This is a little conspiracy to prove that manhood has been gained and adulthood has been attained, and it is entirely untrue. As long as it stays a secret and is contained within the realm of the two original perpetrator and the lady being wooed, there is no problem. The fault line appears when it reaches then mother as well. It gets worse when she starts to protest and in a sense legitimises the claim which anyways was untrue. A man can never outgrow a mother's love. For a mother to believe anything like that and to protest that is detrimental to the relation.
All men, even the middle aged ones, live with a secret desire to get exposed of the lie which they tell to their wives. This is a lie which they want to be called out and it breaks their hearts if their mother believes in what it untrue and abandons them. No child is old enought to be abandoned by a mother. A child always loves to be prioritised and laughed off for his small slips..and for him all his slips are small..as far as the mother is concerned.
I don't know what I am writing, and it seems rubbish. It is incoherent and lacks design. But it is a Mother's Day and society crept between me and my mother, and drove a divide so deep that I could do nothing more than getting my daughter speak with the grandmother, on the Mother's Day. I wish she could never believe that son's love is lost and that societal correctness is a pre-condition of a mother's love for the child. Nothing can be a pre-condition of a mother's love. I wish she knows that even when I walk out of the home, I will always love her. And I wish she believes it, and believes it without requiring me to prove it.
Read it without prejudice..it is not a post, it is a wail of loneliness which travels to the skies. It comes from a life which is forlorn and tired and would do well with a mother's love. It is from the other son, who could not claim "Mere Paas Maa hai".
May 11, 2013
The Pursuit of Words
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[image error]Our lives is a pursuit of meaning. We live in a constant pursuit of a meaning which we intend to attach to the life that we by an accident of nature have been bestowed with. It is through art and literature that we pursue that elusive meaning. Rest is accidental, existential, meant only to sustain life.
Some people give up this quest early in life and oscillate between two extremes. They either consider their own lives a nuisance, lacking any value and devoid of purpose, or they place a crazily high value on otherwise inconsequential and ordinary life, and demand that the world at a pedestal as high and sacred as the pedestal on which they place themselves. They have no balance in live, and though troubled, are not searching for any. Few who are unable to bear with the animalistic life of extremes, set out on a quest.
But why should this life be sustained? It actually makes no sense, if the purpose of life were to be sustaining life itself. We are not even a dot on the timeless scale of the universe. What difference would a couple of years here or there make to you as we'll as to the world. The quest for the meaning of life is through words. Man invented language to understand the world around and also to tolerate it.
Without words, it is hard to survive the brutality of the world which passes by us in such a brusque manner that we are apt to be left with more than a few bruised thoughts. With words we explain the unlove to ourselves and reach out for love which could be ours. Words rise from misery, but every written word announces the demolition of one such misery, in its own small way. People who haven't felt miserable ever, can not write. I am one such soul living in constant misery and gain intermittent relief through words. But I am not a writer in that sense. I do not write on the workdays to submit to magazines, and I do not have a study where I retire to, in order to weave words.
But words are small bandages which I put on my soul, thus hoping to embalm the pain that I earn through the week. Every weekend, it opens a door through which I enter in to a world, an underground with dim orange lights and loud music. I meet some kindred souls there, some partners in crime, who are also there nursing their wounds. We rest our weary shoulders against one another, and suffer in silence, and come out of this little spa for soul, healed, recovered and ready for more
May 5, 2013
Book Review- Among The Believers- An Islamic Journey: By V S Naipaul
Faith is a dangerous thing. Faith serves its purpose when the life is in disarray and you have run out of option. It is of great import in the moments when the despair so deep that it is impossible for human soul to climb out of it.
Some times your best efforts are not good enough to rescue you from the morbid world you find yourself stuck in and events around you change irreversibly for the worse around you with such alacrity that even right response is unfathomable, let alone right resolution. At moments like that faith comes you, joins at your shoulder as wings and lifts you up from the squalid situation that life has thrown you in. It brings in hope, light and optimism in the moments of darkest desperation.
But it becomes a habit, a refuse. It takes effort to bear helplessness and requires industry to introduce a ray of hope in otherwise dark circumstances. Then this angel turns into a devil. This brave book, Among the Believers refers this corrosion of faith. The believers he refers to are the followers of Islam in Asia. He takes a fresh look at the events that formed the Muslim nations of Asia and puts with great lucidity what he finds in his journey which begins from Iran, right after the revolution which overthrew the Shah and placed on the pulpit, Ayatollah Khomeini. With exceptional balance of neutrality and great incisive insight he takes a psycho-philosophical look at the people who embraced Islam as a nationality and adopted citizenship of greater Islam, which transcends the national boundaries.
He is analyses and seeks with the neutrality of a student, but he does not hold himself back. Landing in Iran, he finds the society in rupture, post revolution. The recipe is perfect for gloom, but he finds faith holding the people back. The food is scarce, the riches are lost, but people still are satisfied that Islam has finally prevailed. It is not very uncommon for the people on the other side of the faith, to stand perplexed. It is even in India, a very baffling to find Muslims in Kashmir or elsewhere screaming at times to want to secede as independent nation, obviously a religious nation, and happily open to the possibility of joining in to the Muslim state of Pakistan. This, notwithstanding the dire state of Pakistan economy, standard of living and prospect of growth. Only thing which drives them is to come true to the faith and be among the believers. This is neither logical nor comprehensible.
It is also very similar to people coming out on the streets in full force at a mere hint of any danger to their religion. The same people who are willing to shed blood for the cause of religion, of theirs and others who they view as their opponent and in adverse position to their religious beliefs, are not ready to even do a march on the streets for getting better career for themselves and education and food for their families. They are contended to live in the ghettos in inhuman condition as long as the faith is served. This is confounding and insults human intellect. Naipaul refers to his lost guide in Iran, Behzad, lost between religion and communism and says, "Islam was a complicated religion. It wasn't philosophical or speculative. It was a revealed religion with a Prophet and a complete set of rules." Behzad's dilemma is even grave. He is floating between two faiths, Islam and communism, both demanding subservience of any intellectual examination, governed by set of rules which floats above the scrutiny of logic. But the very logic which Naipaul places claiming the religion to be complicated, turns out to be the very reason as to why Islam is simple. There is no room for doubt and sharpened logic to come to concurrence any of the demand religion places on you as a believer. This is a religion beyond reason and reproach, and thus easy to follow especially to those who are wary or ill-equipped to reason. It in fact is likely to thrive on them.
Naipaul moves around in freshly Islamized Iran, writhing under failing economy, still jubilant at the victory of the religion. Newly liberated from the autocratic Shah, they find hope in religion. But religion has nothing to offer but to demand more of religion. The dream of happiness and prosperity in Quom is far and distant. He does not analyse and dissects from outside, Naipaul allows the people he meets to demonstrate the point. The dichotomy of west bashing comes alive when he refer a woman debating and blasting the west on television when he says," An American or non-Islamic education had given the woman with the chador her competence and authority...Now she appeared to be questioning the value of the kind of person she had become, she was denying some of her own gifts." He flays in air the unreal sense of freedom in Islamic state of Iran, when he mentions, "With true Islam, there was freedom"..and then qualifies it with.."(He meant)..the freedom to be Islamic and Shia, to be divinely ruled." One immediately notices the Hobson's choice presented to the citizens. The people, the poor, who chased a Utopia in which the meek shall inherit the wealth and prosperity, went ahead and support religion as a panacea to all that ailed the society hugely divided between the perished and the prosperous in Shah's time.
There lies the big mistake. Ideology can not substitute governance, even the religious ones. Naipaul says, people think that the ills of the society can be best addressed by Brotherhood, honesty, the will to work and proper recompense for labour. In a sense, one would feel they are right in thinking so. The problem happens when ideology is presented wrapped in all the four. Islam as an ideology is presented to the people wrapped in all these four principles. It seems so similar to how communism was window dressed. Ideologies are nothing but ideas based on logic. When it is wrapped with the basic human panacea, you restrict it from test of logic. It is like a poor marketing plan, where you offer something one needs but makes it mandatory to be sold with something which does not address clear need of the consumer. Thus communism was sold to people, and similarly Islam in Iran was handed over to people who stood behind its success as a polity. Naipaul here puts a simple question, "Why not for those four things? Why go beyond those four things?". Which is a valid question. The answer possibly is because the four things which every human being wants, has stood the test of human evolution and is beyond scrutiny. When an ideology is wrapped in these basic existential requirement it is no longer an ideology. It becomes an Idea, a divine idea, which is beyond the reproach or test of logic. The idea becomes supreme once it gains the power and other tenets which are used to get the buy-in of the masses are discarded.
Author's next stop is in Pakistan. He takes a very different view of the formation of Pakistan. It looks at the basic mistake in how the state based in religion was built. The decision was made to form Pakistan out of the areas of undivided India where Muslims were in majority. There was a mistake. Muslims were not facing insecurity in the areas where they were in majority, for obvious reasons, there was insecurity in areas where they were minority. Unfortunately the philosophy behind the formation of Pakistan left those most insecure in India. They were left with no choice but to move into the newly minted state, with the promise of Islam as the source of liberation. The existing inhabitants did not much like inflow, which they felt would eat into their resources. They were not insecure, they were safe and prosperous, and now they had to share their prosperity with people who were the cause of the creation of new Pakistan. It was not their cause and they had to pay for it. The new migrants moved in with high hopes but landed in to a society which was not that welcoming. They lost their roots and Islam was a substitute of those roots which they left behind. Religion was the only hope. The faith was so deeply etched in their hurt psyche, that they went into denial. They would not believe that it is poor governance which is holding back their prosperity and well being. They would not believe that they are failed by faith, which they tried to use as a substitute to good governance and polity. They would rather believe ,"Men were bad...They didn't live up to the faith. In Pakistan, says Naipaul, that was nearly always where you ended." He mentions how Pakistan came into being, built on hate when he says," They had double hate. They hated the foreigners and they hated Hindus. So the country of Pakistan was based on hate and nothing else."
The author then moves to Malaysia, a nation breaking free of its Hindu-Buddhist past in search of Islam and arising as an Islamic nation with hatred for the Chinese. He looks at the psychological gap which the people who have written off their own history are left with. He writes about it stating, "He (The Malay) existed in limbo. He felt that as a Malay he had nothing." Malaysia is touched briefly (at least as compared to other countries of his visit in quest to understand the Islamic thought), as Naipaul quickly moves to Indonesia.
Indonesia is the most lucid and most poetic part of the book. The story of Indonesia begins with the near total annihilation of three hundred years of Dutch history. After Pakistan, this is a country which Naipaul touches most intimately. He meets Suryadi, and offers an interesting insight, very personal, when he writes about his daughter. The daughter felt in love with a born again Muslim, in whose love, she a graduate, sub-ordinates her intellect, much to the chagrin of her father. It feels so much like old world India, when Prasojo, the young guide of Naipaul mentions the difference between America and India and mentioned that ," People would in Indonesia be going to the house of a friend, going for no reason, only for the reason of friendship. The boy's mother- in Arizona- would say,'What do you want? Which, in Indonesia, was rude."
The play of words creates a portrait so vivid, when Naipaul travels in the countryside of Indonesia, as he goes around trying to understand the truth about pesantren. He mentions who Indonesia grew from a stage of almost non-religious living when he refers about the period after communism was overthrown and people of Prambanam decided "that they should declare themselves Hindus. The trouble was that they didn't know what they should do as Hindus." It calls for exceptional courage when he mentions the flaw in the construction of nations based on religion-"Islam appeared to raise political issues. But it had the flaw of its origins- the flaw that ran right through Islamic history: to the political issues it raised it offered no political or practical solution. It offered only faith." How this flawed thinking has impacted the discourse is pointed when he refers to a discussion, " Most of the Muslims are in the rural areas. Muslims, Muslims..laments Naipaul: He used the word where other people might have said Indonesian."
A very brave book, equally enjoyable and thought provoking. Not to be missed.
Rating: 4/5
Some times your best efforts are not good enough to rescue you from the morbid world you find yourself stuck in and events around you change irreversibly for the worse around you with such alacrity that even right response is unfathomable, let alone right resolution. At moments like that faith comes you, joins at your shoulder as wings and lifts you up from the squalid situation that life has thrown you in. It brings in hope, light and optimism in the moments of darkest desperation.
But it becomes a habit, a refuse. It takes effort to bear helplessness and requires industry to introduce a ray of hope in otherwise dark circumstances. Then this angel turns into a devil. This brave book, Among the Believers refers this corrosion of faith. The believers he refers to are the followers of Islam in Asia. He takes a fresh look at the events that formed the Muslim nations of Asia and puts with great lucidity what he finds in his journey which begins from Iran, right after the revolution which overthrew the Shah and placed on the pulpit, Ayatollah Khomeini. With exceptional balance of neutrality and great incisive insight he takes a psycho-philosophical look at the people who embraced Islam as a nationality and adopted citizenship of greater Islam, which transcends the national boundaries.
He is analyses and seeks with the neutrality of a student, but he does not hold himself back. Landing in Iran, he finds the society in rupture, post revolution. The recipe is perfect for gloom, but he finds faith holding the people back. The food is scarce, the riches are lost, but people still are satisfied that Islam has finally prevailed. It is not very uncommon for the people on the other side of the faith, to stand perplexed. It is even in India, a very baffling to find Muslims in Kashmir or elsewhere screaming at times to want to secede as independent nation, obviously a religious nation, and happily open to the possibility of joining in to the Muslim state of Pakistan. This, notwithstanding the dire state of Pakistan economy, standard of living and prospect of growth. Only thing which drives them is to come true to the faith and be among the believers. This is neither logical nor comprehensible.
It is also very similar to people coming out on the streets in full force at a mere hint of any danger to their religion. The same people who are willing to shed blood for the cause of religion, of theirs and others who they view as their opponent and in adverse position to their religious beliefs, are not ready to even do a march on the streets for getting better career for themselves and education and food for their families. They are contended to live in the ghettos in inhuman condition as long as the faith is served. This is confounding and insults human intellect. Naipaul refers to his lost guide in Iran, Behzad, lost between religion and communism and says, "Islam was a complicated religion. It wasn't philosophical or speculative. It was a revealed religion with a Prophet and a complete set of rules." Behzad's dilemma is even grave. He is floating between two faiths, Islam and communism, both demanding subservience of any intellectual examination, governed by set of rules which floats above the scrutiny of logic. But the very logic which Naipaul places claiming the religion to be complicated, turns out to be the very reason as to why Islam is simple. There is no room for doubt and sharpened logic to come to concurrence any of the demand religion places on you as a believer. This is a religion beyond reason and reproach, and thus easy to follow especially to those who are wary or ill-equipped to reason. It in fact is likely to thrive on them.
Naipaul moves around in freshly Islamized Iran, writhing under failing economy, still jubilant at the victory of the religion. Newly liberated from the autocratic Shah, they find hope in religion. But religion has nothing to offer but to demand more of religion. The dream of happiness and prosperity in Quom is far and distant. He does not analyse and dissects from outside, Naipaul allows the people he meets to demonstrate the point. The dichotomy of west bashing comes alive when he refer a woman debating and blasting the west on television when he says," An American or non-Islamic education had given the woman with the chador her competence and authority...Now she appeared to be questioning the value of the kind of person she had become, she was denying some of her own gifts." He flays in air the unreal sense of freedom in Islamic state of Iran, when he mentions, "With true Islam, there was freedom"..and then qualifies it with.."(He meant)..the freedom to be Islamic and Shia, to be divinely ruled." One immediately notices the Hobson's choice presented to the citizens. The people, the poor, who chased a Utopia in which the meek shall inherit the wealth and prosperity, went ahead and support religion as a panacea to all that ailed the society hugely divided between the perished and the prosperous in Shah's time.
There lies the big mistake. Ideology can not substitute governance, even the religious ones. Naipaul says, people think that the ills of the society can be best addressed by Brotherhood, honesty, the will to work and proper recompense for labour. In a sense, one would feel they are right in thinking so. The problem happens when ideology is presented wrapped in all the four. Islam as an ideology is presented to the people wrapped in all these four principles. It seems so similar to how communism was window dressed. Ideologies are nothing but ideas based on logic. When it is wrapped with the basic human panacea, you restrict it from test of logic. It is like a poor marketing plan, where you offer something one needs but makes it mandatory to be sold with something which does not address clear need of the consumer. Thus communism was sold to people, and similarly Islam in Iran was handed over to people who stood behind its success as a polity. Naipaul here puts a simple question, "Why not for those four things? Why go beyond those four things?". Which is a valid question. The answer possibly is because the four things which every human being wants, has stood the test of human evolution and is beyond scrutiny. When an ideology is wrapped in these basic existential requirement it is no longer an ideology. It becomes an Idea, a divine idea, which is beyond the reproach or test of logic. The idea becomes supreme once it gains the power and other tenets which are used to get the buy-in of the masses are discarded.
Author's next stop is in Pakistan. He takes a very different view of the formation of Pakistan. It looks at the basic mistake in how the state based in religion was built. The decision was made to form Pakistan out of the areas of undivided India where Muslims were in majority. There was a mistake. Muslims were not facing insecurity in the areas where they were in majority, for obvious reasons, there was insecurity in areas where they were minority. Unfortunately the philosophy behind the formation of Pakistan left those most insecure in India. They were left with no choice but to move into the newly minted state, with the promise of Islam as the source of liberation. The existing inhabitants did not much like inflow, which they felt would eat into their resources. They were not insecure, they were safe and prosperous, and now they had to share their prosperity with people who were the cause of the creation of new Pakistan. It was not their cause and they had to pay for it. The new migrants moved in with high hopes but landed in to a society which was not that welcoming. They lost their roots and Islam was a substitute of those roots which they left behind. Religion was the only hope. The faith was so deeply etched in their hurt psyche, that they went into denial. They would not believe that it is poor governance which is holding back their prosperity and well being. They would not believe that they are failed by faith, which they tried to use as a substitute to good governance and polity. They would rather believe ,"Men were bad...They didn't live up to the faith. In Pakistan, says Naipaul, that was nearly always where you ended." He mentions how Pakistan came into being, built on hate when he says," They had double hate. They hated the foreigners and they hated Hindus. So the country of Pakistan was based on hate and nothing else."
The author then moves to Malaysia, a nation breaking free of its Hindu-Buddhist past in search of Islam and arising as an Islamic nation with hatred for the Chinese. He looks at the psychological gap which the people who have written off their own history are left with. He writes about it stating, "He (The Malay) existed in limbo. He felt that as a Malay he had nothing." Malaysia is touched briefly (at least as compared to other countries of his visit in quest to understand the Islamic thought), as Naipaul quickly moves to Indonesia.
Indonesia is the most lucid and most poetic part of the book. The story of Indonesia begins with the near total annihilation of three hundred years of Dutch history. After Pakistan, this is a country which Naipaul touches most intimately. He meets Suryadi, and offers an interesting insight, very personal, when he writes about his daughter. The daughter felt in love with a born again Muslim, in whose love, she a graduate, sub-ordinates her intellect, much to the chagrin of her father. It feels so much like old world India, when Prasojo, the young guide of Naipaul mentions the difference between America and India and mentioned that ," People would in Indonesia be going to the house of a friend, going for no reason, only for the reason of friendship. The boy's mother- in Arizona- would say,'What do you want? Which, in Indonesia, was rude."
The play of words creates a portrait so vivid, when Naipaul travels in the countryside of Indonesia, as he goes around trying to understand the truth about pesantren. He mentions who Indonesia grew from a stage of almost non-religious living when he refers about the period after communism was overthrown and people of Prambanam decided "that they should declare themselves Hindus. The trouble was that they didn't know what they should do as Hindus." It calls for exceptional courage when he mentions the flaw in the construction of nations based on religion-"Islam appeared to raise political issues. But it had the flaw of its origins- the flaw that ran right through Islamic history: to the political issues it raised it offered no political or practical solution. It offered only faith." How this flawed thinking has impacted the discourse is pointed when he refers to a discussion, " Most of the Muslims are in the rural areas. Muslims, Muslims..laments Naipaul: He used the word where other people might have said Indonesian."
A very brave book, equally enjoyable and thought provoking. Not to be missed.
Rating: 4/5
May 1, 2013
Writer's Block- A Moment of Self-Doubt
I almost gave up writing for good seven to eight years. A period during which I wrote nothing but office mails and minutes of meetings and contracts and such things, dreary and dull, devoid of any beauty or romance.
I would write in my mind, sentences getting written and erased in my mind. I quit smoking right at the turn of the century and the glamor of smoke forming poetry in the air to be scribbled with urgency was lost.
So I did not write, until couple of years back a sense of loss, a scary thought of dying with all my thoughts faced me. Something told me I had it in me. It used to be fun. It used to be exceptionally fun in good old, pre-computer days when I would write on a paper with my pen. I felt that I was living half my life, with a half a me, the half which carried the truer sense of me, stifled and locked inside me. I would be loud, obvious, and laugh with the crowd which obliterated and belittled the intensity of thought. I laughed with a voice which scared me at nights and which did not reach my eyes.
I eventually dug deeper and convinced myself that I need to write. I convinced myself that I hold within my being a thought which is sacred, even more scared then the human life itself which carries me through.
But then writing is always easy. You know how to write and you can go ahead,erect a mast and proclaim yourself as a writer. Friends were kind and they smiled at the juvenile attempt to what I considered as a journey to reclaim myself. So came a book and the collection of my poems, a short story and this blog.
But then this whole exercise is so painfully fraught with self-doubt and dilemma. Just because every human being knows how to speak, does it qualify us to be a speaker. Is not the same true about writing? Can I self-endorse myself as a writer, when all I am doing is writing just as a human being speaks?
I write and search my answers through my writing. I am surrounded by questions and writing help me dive deep to search for the answers. But then, I am stung by attacks, which almost imply that I write not because I have in me to be a writer, but to satisfy my vanity. It hurts and badgers my own idea about myself. I try writing as secretly as I could and indulge into reading as slyly as I could without attracting any attention, in the middle of buying grocery, raising the kid and working the day-job. The mockery raises its level and after a while you almost start believing in it. The self-doubt creeps and after a tiring and extracting work day, you sit down to write in silence. The exercise of writing becomes almost adulterous, almost as scandalous and not half as entertaining.
And then you look at your own writing with the eyes of a murderous killer, you want to chop the words to alphabet and you do not like what you have written a bit. And you want to be dead with your dead writing, for something speaks in your mind- there is no dilemma that death can not address. You question whether you have a writer in you or are you merely an arranger of words, akin to a kid playing with building block. But is there no grace, no dignity in a kid playing with a building block? What about the grace of creation, the dignity of exploration, which is underlying in the kid's activity. My writing seems worse, and when fraught with severe self-doubt, when I write regarding the poverty of my feminished work, people construe it to be modesty. It isn't, it is the worth of my work on my own self-depriciating scale. I truly do not know if my writing is worthy enough to be sustained and nourished.
I mostly write to find answers. But some times I write, only to view the questions more vividly. This is one such post. It has no answer for me. It is only my hard-headed desperation, intending to look at a dangerously mocking question in its eyes, eyeball to eyeball confrontation as they say in military parlance. I have no answers, but I have never been a man for easy answers., easy answers also never liked me much, they never would come to me. Should I continue to write and expose my buffoonery to the world at large or should I keep my own mediocrity carefully under the wraps and keep people guessing? Do I really have in it me to be a writer, or it is mere pretense?
If I do not have in me a writer, why as the day draws to close, without a good reading or satisfying writing, my self resembles a haunted house? Is it true that I neither have talent, perseverance nor the discipline to be a writer? I shout out in the valley and the valley throws back the questions at me with increased amplitude and amplified vengeance. Self-doubt clouds the conscious, but I know one thing, why do I feel happier and liberated when I write something good, even if the act within it carries a sense of criminality? Answers, anyone? I do have a feeling that if I could bring about a sense of ritualistic discipline about my writing, answers would come. But I do not know at this moment, if the answer lies in there. I am in the middle of all bad things, Mid-life, mid-career crisis, and a severe writer block. I find a reflection of my confusion and desperate state in George Orwell when he writes," Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some
painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven
on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand" . It pleases me to be brutal with myself, which in itself is quit masochistic and still write, thus this post. I seemingly have not a way out. In the middle of this, my book which is still struggling to get past the chapter-3 languishes in a long wait. It has come to me to be written, but am I the right person to write it?
I would write in my mind, sentences getting written and erased in my mind. I quit smoking right at the turn of the century and the glamor of smoke forming poetry in the air to be scribbled with urgency was lost.
So I did not write, until couple of years back a sense of loss, a scary thought of dying with all my thoughts faced me. Something told me I had it in me. It used to be fun. It used to be exceptionally fun in good old, pre-computer days when I would write on a paper with my pen. I felt that I was living half my life, with a half a me, the half which carried the truer sense of me, stifled and locked inside me. I would be loud, obvious, and laugh with the crowd which obliterated and belittled the intensity of thought. I laughed with a voice which scared me at nights and which did not reach my eyes. I eventually dug deeper and convinced myself that I need to write. I convinced myself that I hold within my being a thought which is sacred, even more scared then the human life itself which carries me through.
But then writing is always easy. You know how to write and you can go ahead,erect a mast and proclaim yourself as a writer. Friends were kind and they smiled at the juvenile attempt to what I considered as a journey to reclaim myself. So came a book and the collection of my poems, a short story and this blog.
But then this whole exercise is so painfully fraught with self-doubt and dilemma. Just because every human being knows how to speak, does it qualify us to be a speaker. Is not the same true about writing? Can I self-endorse myself as a writer, when all I am doing is writing just as a human being speaks?
I write and search my answers through my writing. I am surrounded by questions and writing help me dive deep to search for the answers. But then, I am stung by attacks, which almost imply that I write not because I have in me to be a writer, but to satisfy my vanity. It hurts and badgers my own idea about myself. I try writing as secretly as I could and indulge into reading as slyly as I could without attracting any attention, in the middle of buying grocery, raising the kid and working the day-job. The mockery raises its level and after a while you almost start believing in it. The self-doubt creeps and after a tiring and extracting work day, you sit down to write in silence. The exercise of writing becomes almost adulterous, almost as scandalous and not half as entertaining.
And then you look at your own writing with the eyes of a murderous killer, you want to chop the words to alphabet and you do not like what you have written a bit. And you want to be dead with your dead writing, for something speaks in your mind- there is no dilemma that death can not address. You question whether you have a writer in you or are you merely an arranger of words, akin to a kid playing with building block. But is there no grace, no dignity in a kid playing with a building block? What about the grace of creation, the dignity of exploration, which is underlying in the kid's activity. My writing seems worse, and when fraught with severe self-doubt, when I write regarding the poverty of my feminished work, people construe it to be modesty. It isn't, it is the worth of my work on my own self-depriciating scale. I truly do not know if my writing is worthy enough to be sustained and nourished.
I mostly write to find answers. But some times I write, only to view the questions more vividly. This is one such post. It has no answer for me. It is only my hard-headed desperation, intending to look at a dangerously mocking question in its eyes, eyeball to eyeball confrontation as they say in military parlance. I have no answers, but I have never been a man for easy answers., easy answers also never liked me much, they never would come to me. Should I continue to write and expose my buffoonery to the world at large or should I keep my own mediocrity carefully under the wraps and keep people guessing? Do I really have in it me to be a writer, or it is mere pretense?
If I do not have in me a writer, why as the day draws to close, without a good reading or satisfying writing, my self resembles a haunted house? Is it true that I neither have talent, perseverance nor the discipline to be a writer? I shout out in the valley and the valley throws back the questions at me with increased amplitude and amplified vengeance. Self-doubt clouds the conscious, but I know one thing, why do I feel happier and liberated when I write something good, even if the act within it carries a sense of criminality? Answers, anyone? I do have a feeling that if I could bring about a sense of ritualistic discipline about my writing, answers would come. But I do not know at this moment, if the answer lies in there. I am in the middle of all bad things, Mid-life, mid-career crisis, and a severe writer block. I find a reflection of my confusion and desperate state in George Orwell when he writes," Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some
painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven
on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand" . It pleases me to be brutal with myself, which in itself is quit masochistic and still write, thus this post. I seemingly have not a way out. In the middle of this, my book which is still struggling to get past the chapter-3 languishes in a long wait. It has come to me to be written, but am I the right person to write it?
April 27, 2013
Logic, Rationalization and Human Kindness
Today is the day of Logic. A few days back, annoyed with the world which makes less and less of a sense as the time passes by, I put up a status on my Facebook account. Annoyed and angry and disappointed with failure of logic and my own insistence to stick logic to buffoonish face of the world, I wrote.
I wrote,"It is most unfair to expect life to be fair. Life is not designed to be fair. Life is just designed to be. When you expect life to be fair, you are being unfair to yourself. You will weigh heavy with guilt or sense of failure. To search for justice in this world is a tiresome and futile exercise. Do not expect life to be fair and the world around to be just, but be just and fair anyway."
Prompt came the reply, from good friend Vinay," There is no fixed point, its an experience. People work hard to look good and they do. Events like machines have processes. Like aesthetics, justice floats in our eyes. Problem is that we can't overcome the judgement. We don't have the wisdom to review it on temporal scale."
Vinay is a great writer and even greater thinker. This is a good advantage of having a great and independent thinker read through your thoughts, ideas and even whims. It challenges, examines, shreds and even batters your thought till something really sensible comes out of it.
Is there something called Justice there in this world? Is their something called logic, which defines why what happens, happens? Is justice and Logic an elusive dream, or is it a juvenile chase for the impossible, the non-existent?
Things happen. That is the long and short of it. They happen, as accidental as human birth itself it. Once borne, being blessed with intelligence so different from other living organisms, we start inventing reasons for a merely accidental act of nature. We imagine some great cause being associated with our being borne. That makes life bearable for us.
It is a necessity for human existence. The life and the world around us is hostile to us, we struggle and strive to create a place in an unfeeling world to allow us to exist. This world wouldn't bat an eyelid if we were dead. We create a flimsy imagery around us. We love this world around us and want to find our place in an unfeeling, unfriendly world, and in that struggle, create a fictitious world which needs us and loves us equally.
Life is dreary and arduous for all living being alike. But other animals do not feel, and do not feel so let down by this discovery. They never notice and never care. We, the humans, have a need and necessity to assign a rhyme and reason to what happens around us. We discover rhyme and reason. More often than not they are the crutches on which civilization walks. We live through it. The value changes with the need of the society, it changes with the times in which we live. At times, it is valour which is supreme, then at times it is compassion, it is selflessness sometimes. The supreme value changes in accordance with the time we live in.
We survive and thrive on logic and rationality of human mind. It is necessary for us to be honest to each other, for us to be kind to each other, for human species to survive and we build rationale around it. And it helps. It would break our collective hearts if we were to discover that your kindness might not always beget kindness, that truth may be returned with betrayal or love with hatred.
It will take a sheer and acceptation, non-mercenary nobility to withstand this lack of logic and live with a sense of nobility, anyways.
To understand that your benevolence will be thwarted at times with cruelty, that the evil might go through the world unpunished and there is no penance and no retribution in afterlife, takes courage. To accept the world as devoid of justice and still to act with love, benevolence and nobility, that is what human heart is all about. It is about knowing what is right and doing it, without any expectation of a logical outcome of it.
The argument is not about letting go of logic as a primitive version. Logic can always stand by the side of kindness and larger good. It is only through logic can one derive the failure of logic, and that is a great gift that we as humans have.
I wrote,"It is most unfair to expect life to be fair. Life is not designed to be fair. Life is just designed to be. When you expect life to be fair, you are being unfair to yourself. You will weigh heavy with guilt or sense of failure. To search for justice in this world is a tiresome and futile exercise. Do not expect life to be fair and the world around to be just, but be just and fair anyway."
Prompt came the reply, from good friend Vinay," There is no fixed point, its an experience. People work hard to look good and they do. Events like machines have processes. Like aesthetics, justice floats in our eyes. Problem is that we can't overcome the judgement. We don't have the wisdom to review it on temporal scale."
Vinay is a great writer and even greater thinker. This is a good advantage of having a great and independent thinker read through your thoughts, ideas and even whims. It challenges, examines, shreds and even batters your thought till something really sensible comes out of it.
Is there something called Justice there in this world? Is their something called logic, which defines why what happens, happens? Is justice and Logic an elusive dream, or is it a juvenile chase for the impossible, the non-existent?
Things happen. That is the long and short of it. They happen, as accidental as human birth itself it. Once borne, being blessed with intelligence so different from other living organisms, we start inventing reasons for a merely accidental act of nature. We imagine some great cause being associated with our being borne. That makes life bearable for us.
It is a necessity for human existence. The life and the world around us is hostile to us, we struggle and strive to create a place in an unfeeling world to allow us to exist. This world wouldn't bat an eyelid if we were dead. We create a flimsy imagery around us. We love this world around us and want to find our place in an unfeeling, unfriendly world, and in that struggle, create a fictitious world which needs us and loves us equally.
Life is dreary and arduous for all living being alike. But other animals do not feel, and do not feel so let down by this discovery. They never notice and never care. We, the humans, have a need and necessity to assign a rhyme and reason to what happens around us. We discover rhyme and reason. More often than not they are the crutches on which civilization walks. We live through it. The value changes with the need of the society, it changes with the times in which we live. At times, it is valour which is supreme, then at times it is compassion, it is selflessness sometimes. The supreme value changes in accordance with the time we live in.
We survive and thrive on logic and rationality of human mind. It is necessary for us to be honest to each other, for us to be kind to each other, for human species to survive and we build rationale around it. And it helps. It would break our collective hearts if we were to discover that your kindness might not always beget kindness, that truth may be returned with betrayal or love with hatred.
It will take a sheer and acceptation, non-mercenary nobility to withstand this lack of logic and live with a sense of nobility, anyways.
To understand that your benevolence will be thwarted at times with cruelty, that the evil might go through the world unpunished and there is no penance and no retribution in afterlife, takes courage. To accept the world as devoid of justice and still to act with love, benevolence and nobility, that is what human heart is all about. It is about knowing what is right and doing it, without any expectation of a logical outcome of it.
The argument is not about letting go of logic as a primitive version. Logic can always stand by the side of kindness and larger good. It is only through logic can one derive the failure of logic, and that is a great gift that we as humans have.
April 20, 2013
A Broken Moon- A Sequel to The Moon and a Little Girl- A Story or is it
Truth
She was a little five year old, as old as my own daughter. She had her father working on daily wages and did not change into pink pyjamas with Disney characters at night to snuggle into the protective arms of her father. He would come back late at the night with meagre vegetable which they would cook on the luckier days and then tired of back breaking work and backbone breaking hostile world around them, would go to sleep.
She would sit on the side of the road and watch the cars pass by, throwing in the air poisonous smoke. She would watch the schools and kids her size walk in there, every morning in uniforms and waving back to their parents, who dropped them in their long cars. She would hear some sort of chants from outside the tall walls which guarded those schools and wonder what fairy world existed inside.
Her father would tell her, one day she will go to that school. He would be worried and apprehensive on the days when there was no work and hold her tiny hand. She would feel comfort in his rugged, and rough hands and he in her soft, little, mud laden hands. His heart would melt away at the look of her soft, tiny hands going rough with each passing days. Her face which had a tinge of pink when she was borne, slowly gained the grey resembling the grey of his own life.
He wanted her to be showered, and cleaned and adorned with Pink clean clothes. He dreamt of some day when you would send her to the school which would somehow transform her life and those to come after her. He was scared as how quickly last five years have passed, and how little things have changed. She grew up and learned to walk on the footpath. He would watch with some bitterness and some envy, fathers who would pick up their daughters in their arms when they crossed their slums, to ensure the dirt does not reach them. He felt embarrassed that in the same squalor her daughter will have to grow.
He would sometime walk in the small market and look with a touch of pain, all the colourful clothes for the kids which would adorn the shops. He thought of the dress, the green one, torn at the edges which his daughter would wear for week, and then wear it again after it was washed. It was a hand me down his wife had got from the household, she worked as a maid. He would look at her and felt sorry that she was growing so fast. He first noticed when he saw some men at the pan shop staring at her. These men were such lech. He had no money to cover her and no courage to fight them. He would ask her wife to take her away. He was a pariah of the society at large but he was a father. He would be furious and the violent will only move inwards. He knew not what to do.
She, the five year old will look at the polythene packet hanging on the small toy store, with small gas stove and utensils. The uncle told it was a kitchen set. She did not know what a kitchen meant, they had one room in which her mother cooked. She wanted to cook like her mother. One day, on the footpath, she found a poster with a woman in strange white clothes. She asked her mother who she was, her mother did not know her. The Shopkeeper uncle told her, it was Suneeta Williams. She had never heard such a name. In fact, a name with two parts itself sounded amusing to him. She was always called only Gudia. He also told her that she went to moon.
Gudia watched the moon with amusement since that day. She grew fonder of moon. She thought and dreamt of a day when she would get those white jacket and fly to moon. She felt there won't be any dust or smoke there on the moon. One day there was a marriage procession passing through the narrow lane next to her shack. She did not know what it was, but it sounded fun. She decided only two things she wanted to do in her life, Fly off to the moon, or get married. In the evening as she sat with her father outside the room, she told this to her father, who looked at her face and then laughed off. She always loved when he laughed and held her closed to him. She felt so safe and so well comforted. He was not very big or tall. He was thin and short, but he carried a sense of calm and security for him.
He loved sitting outside their home and watch cars pass by on the nights. When she spoke of her little dreams, her planned voyage to the moon and a colourful wedding she planned for herself, suddenly the back aching from lifting the luggage at the local vegetable wholesale market will fade away. He wanted to give her everything. He thought of the kitchen set. He wanted to get it for her. She had never had any toy in all her five years. He had seen gudiya looking longingly at that. He had asked the price, it was not very expensive. But the choice between the food for the day and the toy was always difficult to make.
The moon would always watch the little girl with fondness and get little sad to look at the silent frustrations of the father. One day, he decided to make the choice which had been haunting him every evening at the close of the day. He bought the kitchen set and walked to the home. The moon was smiling and jubilant. He went in, asked wife to stay silent and placed the kitchen set on the small rack. Then he whispered and asked where was Gudiya. She did not answer and as he looked up he could see worry. She was not seen for whole day, since afternoon.
They walked to the police station. The man their was a big man, he told them to get off. Shouted at them and cursed their type who created problems for the Police and their political masters with their masters. He fought the fear and persisted that FIR be filed.
They wrote something, and the father came back home. They went looking in the neighbourhood. Towards the morning, someone came running, and took them to the broken wall next to the school playground. They rushed, and saw what was left of Gudiya. Her father, with tears flowing from his eyes, picked her up and carried her to the police station. They carried the brutalised child to the police station. The big man, the officer, still imperious, angry at this came and gave them some money to go back and not create a scene. The father, mad in disgust at the Big man and his own helplessness, threw the money back. He could not understand. He held the tiny pink hand tighter, and cried. Some people came and took the kid to hospital and father to home. He looked at the unopened kitchen set and cried loud, a cry that carried the smell of death in it. A crack, a blood red line appeared in the moon and the broken moon cried in blood. The Moon had lost a friend. A crime for which no justice is possible happened, and the Moon, was as helpless as the poor father.
She would sit on the side of the road and watch the cars pass by, throwing in the air poisonous smoke. She would watch the schools and kids her size walk in there, every morning in uniforms and waving back to their parents, who dropped them in their long cars. She would hear some sort of chants from outside the tall walls which guarded those schools and wonder what fairy world existed inside.
Her father would tell her, one day she will go to that school. He would be worried and apprehensive on the days when there was no work and hold her tiny hand. She would feel comfort in his rugged, and rough hands and he in her soft, little, mud laden hands. His heart would melt away at the look of her soft, tiny hands going rough with each passing days. Her face which had a tinge of pink when she was borne, slowly gained the grey resembling the grey of his own life.
He wanted her to be showered, and cleaned and adorned with Pink clean clothes. He dreamt of some day when you would send her to the school which would somehow transform her life and those to come after her. He was scared as how quickly last five years have passed, and how little things have changed. She grew up and learned to walk on the footpath. He would watch with some bitterness and some envy, fathers who would pick up their daughters in their arms when they crossed their slums, to ensure the dirt does not reach them. He felt embarrassed that in the same squalor her daughter will have to grow.
He would sometime walk in the small market and look with a touch of pain, all the colourful clothes for the kids which would adorn the shops. He thought of the dress, the green one, torn at the edges which his daughter would wear for week, and then wear it again after it was washed. It was a hand me down his wife had got from the household, she worked as a maid. He would look at her and felt sorry that she was growing so fast. He first noticed when he saw some men at the pan shop staring at her. These men were such lech. He had no money to cover her and no courage to fight them. He would ask her wife to take her away. He was a pariah of the society at large but he was a father. He would be furious and the violent will only move inwards. He knew not what to do.
She, the five year old will look at the polythene packet hanging on the small toy store, with small gas stove and utensils. The uncle told it was a kitchen set. She did not know what a kitchen meant, they had one room in which her mother cooked. She wanted to cook like her mother. One day, on the footpath, she found a poster with a woman in strange white clothes. She asked her mother who she was, her mother did not know her. The Shopkeeper uncle told her, it was Suneeta Williams. She had never heard such a name. In fact, a name with two parts itself sounded amusing to him. She was always called only Gudia. He also told her that she went to moon.
Gudia watched the moon with amusement since that day. She grew fonder of moon. She thought and dreamt of a day when she would get those white jacket and fly to moon. She felt there won't be any dust or smoke there on the moon. One day there was a marriage procession passing through the narrow lane next to her shack. She did not know what it was, but it sounded fun. She decided only two things she wanted to do in her life, Fly off to the moon, or get married. In the evening as she sat with her father outside the room, she told this to her father, who looked at her face and then laughed off. She always loved when he laughed and held her closed to him. She felt so safe and so well comforted. He was not very big or tall. He was thin and short, but he carried a sense of calm and security for him.
He loved sitting outside their home and watch cars pass by on the nights. When she spoke of her little dreams, her planned voyage to the moon and a colourful wedding she planned for herself, suddenly the back aching from lifting the luggage at the local vegetable wholesale market will fade away. He wanted to give her everything. He thought of the kitchen set. He wanted to get it for her. She had never had any toy in all her five years. He had seen gudiya looking longingly at that. He had asked the price, it was not very expensive. But the choice between the food for the day and the toy was always difficult to make.
The moon would always watch the little girl with fondness and get little sad to look at the silent frustrations of the father. One day, he decided to make the choice which had been haunting him every evening at the close of the day. He bought the kitchen set and walked to the home. The moon was smiling and jubilant. He went in, asked wife to stay silent and placed the kitchen set on the small rack. Then he whispered and asked where was Gudiya. She did not answer and as he looked up he could see worry. She was not seen for whole day, since afternoon.
They walked to the police station. The man their was a big man, he told them to get off. Shouted at them and cursed their type who created problems for the Police and their political masters with their masters. He fought the fear and persisted that FIR be filed.
They wrote something, and the father came back home. They went looking in the neighbourhood. Towards the morning, someone came running, and took them to the broken wall next to the school playground. They rushed, and saw what was left of Gudiya. Her father, with tears flowing from his eyes, picked her up and carried her to the police station. They carried the brutalised child to the police station. The big man, the officer, still imperious, angry at this came and gave them some money to go back and not create a scene. The father, mad in disgust at the Big man and his own helplessness, threw the money back. He could not understand. He held the tiny pink hand tighter, and cried. Some people came and took the kid to hospital and father to home. He looked at the unopened kitchen set and cried loud, a cry that carried the smell of death in it. A crack, a blood red line appeared in the moon and the broken moon cried in blood. The Moon had lost a friend. A crime for which no justice is possible happened, and the Moon, was as helpless as the poor father.
April 18, 2013
The Moon and a Little Girl- Nonu's New Friend
The human mind is an autocratic tool. It is driven by it's own fancies. It will let go of the most extra-ordinary events created with the most efforts, pass by uninterested, but will pick up like pearls among the pebbles, the seemingly most ordinary ones. It is really fun to look back at time and to assess and evaluate what your mind has decided to hold and keep and cherish. Those magical moments are more often than not, inexpensive, easier to attain.
I recently drove off, annoyed by to stressful a schedule to the mountains with my wife and five year old. While a post has already been placed mentioning the tranquil beauty of Shimla and the Naldehra golf course, when today, a fortnight later I look at that trip, which did I carry back home with me? It isn't the mountains, the tall trees and the salubrious air. What I remember is the drive up to the mountain, and the Moon which chased us with all its benign beauty.
As we rose from the plains and drove up, the night spread across on the mountains. I drove watchful of the sharp headlights from vehicles from the other side and sharper turns. Nonu was slightly silent, a bit due to exhaustion and a bit due to the mountain sickness.
As we took a turn from the valley, right in front of us was happy and smiling full moon, shining with all its benevolent whiteness. So then a story was created, a ploy to keep Nonu engaged was invented. We declared the Moon to be her friend, and her schoolmate, though not of her class, not of KG-A. As we would move on the circuitous path in the mountain, the moon will play the hide and seek with the child.
As it would go into hiding, we would urge Nonu to be kind to moon and forgive him in case he might have teased her in the class. We explained his brief absence by telling her that Moon's mother has not sent her to the school today because he had too much of noodles. And then at another turn, from the front of the car, the Moon will get behind us and follow and we would tell her that the moon is following her seeking her friendship. She will play her part and scold him for wandering off here and there, for teasing her before eventually granting the poor Moon, so enamoured with her, a royal pardon and a divine friendship.
Of all the weathers, of all the mountains, it is the memory of that moon and that little girl who became friend to the moon, came back with me. I know not what she carried back, but when I look at her sleeping in the morning in her cream coloured pyjamas, which I do every day, even on day like today when I took off early to catch the flight, I wish she remembered her friend from the mountains all her life.
The moon will always be with her, and will talk to her in her moments of loneliness. It is this connect with the nature which will help her transform the desperate darkness of loneliness to soothing serenity of solitude. She will of course, have friends, but they will not be a substitute for self. Friendship thus found will enhance her being. Such friendship becomes wings which lifts the soul upwards, and will not be crutches for her to lean on and crawl through life. I hope I will be one of her friends, but then I know, there will still be moments of lonely despair as life would have it. You do not have to lead love into your life, for if it finds you worthy, it will knock your doors with all gentleness and will embrace you, once you open the door. Always remember, love doesn't come by chase, it will come with you as you lift yourself to be worthy of it. And also remember, love will always be a flowing brook and never a stagnant pond. The love survives all the fourteen phases of the moon and even the fifteenth phase of absence. True love when it finds you, will transcend the ephemeral nature of time and will carry you into an eternal tranquility. You, my child, will find the true love and true calling, as true as the bottomless tranquility of your eyes, and as playful.
Sometimes the night will fall, and silence will hang heavy through the night. Some nights, the questions will descend from the sky far more numerous than the stars which accompany the night and night will become more unforgiving than the day. As life will have it, I will by then be all spirit and a warm memory in the deep of your heart. In moments as such, just sit in the balcony and wait not for your prince to climb by your long locks like the fairy tale, with the longing of a wretched, incomplete soul, rather look out at your childhood friend. Hold the hands of moonlight which your childhood friend, the Moon, spreads in front of you. You talk to him and he will unlock all the answers which you hold in your heart, my sweet daughter. He will teach you to look within, and not without for the answers.
At such moments, long after I am gone, just close your eyes for a while and think of the rare dinners we had together on our terrace, when you were five and counted the stars. Just look up then and count the stars and you will find one of the star, right next to the moon, looking at you with a rare indulgence, a star whose face will shine with fatherly pride. Believe it then, that it is me, your father looking at you when he has become a mere spirit and thought. Just wipe off that tiny tear from the corner of your lovely, blue left eye and smile, for I will be smiling at you in all your loneliest nights, together with the Moon, your friend from the mountains. You will never be lonely ever in all your life and you will not face a challenge which will not be surmountable. You will discover peace in yourself and within that peace you will find yourself. Your moon and your father will always follow you, through all the nights, without ever stepping in your way. Your baba will always beat in the deep recesses of your heart and lovingly run fingers through your weary head every night, putting you to sleep and whisper softly every dawn as a morning breeze, waking you up.
I recently drove off, annoyed by to stressful a schedule to the mountains with my wife and five year old. While a post has already been placed mentioning the tranquil beauty of Shimla and the Naldehra golf course, when today, a fortnight later I look at that trip, which did I carry back home with me? It isn't the mountains, the tall trees and the salubrious air. What I remember is the drive up to the mountain, and the Moon which chased us with all its benign beauty.
As we rose from the plains and drove up, the night spread across on the mountains. I drove watchful of the sharp headlights from vehicles from the other side and sharper turns. Nonu was slightly silent, a bit due to exhaustion and a bit due to the mountain sickness.
As we took a turn from the valley, right in front of us was happy and smiling full moon, shining with all its benevolent whiteness. So then a story was created, a ploy to keep Nonu engaged was invented. We declared the Moon to be her friend, and her schoolmate, though not of her class, not of KG-A. As we would move on the circuitous path in the mountain, the moon will play the hide and seek with the child.
As it would go into hiding, we would urge Nonu to be kind to moon and forgive him in case he might have teased her in the class. We explained his brief absence by telling her that Moon's mother has not sent her to the school today because he had too much of noodles. And then at another turn, from the front of the car, the Moon will get behind us and follow and we would tell her that the moon is following her seeking her friendship. She will play her part and scold him for wandering off here and there, for teasing her before eventually granting the poor Moon, so enamoured with her, a royal pardon and a divine friendship.
Of all the weathers, of all the mountains, it is the memory of that moon and that little girl who became friend to the moon, came back with me. I know not what she carried back, but when I look at her sleeping in the morning in her cream coloured pyjamas, which I do every day, even on day like today when I took off early to catch the flight, I wish she remembered her friend from the mountains all her life.
The moon will always be with her, and will talk to her in her moments of loneliness. It is this connect with the nature which will help her transform the desperate darkness of loneliness to soothing serenity of solitude. She will of course, have friends, but they will not be a substitute for self. Friendship thus found will enhance her being. Such friendship becomes wings which lifts the soul upwards, and will not be crutches for her to lean on and crawl through life. I hope I will be one of her friends, but then I know, there will still be moments of lonely despair as life would have it. You do not have to lead love into your life, for if it finds you worthy, it will knock your doors with all gentleness and will embrace you, once you open the door. Always remember, love doesn't come by chase, it will come with you as you lift yourself to be worthy of it. And also remember, love will always be a flowing brook and never a stagnant pond. The love survives all the fourteen phases of the moon and even the fifteenth phase of absence. True love when it finds you, will transcend the ephemeral nature of time and will carry you into an eternal tranquility. You, my child, will find the true love and true calling, as true as the bottomless tranquility of your eyes, and as playful.
Sometimes the night will fall, and silence will hang heavy through the night. Some nights, the questions will descend from the sky far more numerous than the stars which accompany the night and night will become more unforgiving than the day. As life will have it, I will by then be all spirit and a warm memory in the deep of your heart. In moments as such, just sit in the balcony and wait not for your prince to climb by your long locks like the fairy tale, with the longing of a wretched, incomplete soul, rather look out at your childhood friend. Hold the hands of moonlight which your childhood friend, the Moon, spreads in front of you. You talk to him and he will unlock all the answers which you hold in your heart, my sweet daughter. He will teach you to look within, and not without for the answers.
At such moments, long after I am gone, just close your eyes for a while and think of the rare dinners we had together on our terrace, when you were five and counted the stars. Just look up then and count the stars and you will find one of the star, right next to the moon, looking at you with a rare indulgence, a star whose face will shine with fatherly pride. Believe it then, that it is me, your father looking at you when he has become a mere spirit and thought. Just wipe off that tiny tear from the corner of your lovely, blue left eye and smile, for I will be smiling at you in all your loneliest nights, together with the Moon, your friend from the mountains. You will never be lonely ever in all your life and you will not face a challenge which will not be surmountable. You will discover peace in yourself and within that peace you will find yourself. Your moon and your father will always follow you, through all the nights, without ever stepping in your way. Your baba will always beat in the deep recesses of your heart and lovingly run fingers through your weary head every night, putting you to sleep and whisper softly every dawn as a morning breeze, waking you up.
April 13, 2013
My Life with Books- Literature and Life
When I look back at my own life, most of the education which I picked up was not from my schooling but from the books that I read. When walking through the maze in search of something which can be termed knowledge, I actually one day for the first time found the refreshing waves of life -transforming books hitting my mind, I realised this was what it was.
All else was a tiring wait, a preparation. The education in the schools, with no insult to the great and loving teachers who without giving in to the frustration arising out of trying to scale up the intellect of my lower order mind taught me, was essentially a preparatory work. They stepped into my mind and prepared the soil in which great ideas can successfully be sowed tomorrow and find nourishment enough to help them bloom into the greater plants with lovely flowers.
Academic cycle, though, was not without merit, or without occasional spurt of education. But largely that was accidental. I read when not even ten, great epics of Ramayana and Mahabharata. I read them and thought of what would have been going on in the lives of the great characters which built those stories. They were larger than life characters carrying within them the human philosophy which I was too young to understand but old enough to feel. They started forming the value system of the child on which latter day man was to be built. They may be invented myths but I did believe in them. I stepped into my teenage with all the common features of rebellion, disbelief in the world but with an undying belief that the life with defined values of love, trust, honesty was truly possible.
I knew a life built around these values was not easy life, this much my reading told me, but the anticipated difficulty did not deter me. I read that Rama had to abandon the luxury of palaces and a great war of Mahabharata had to be fought to protect those principles. That is the way it should be and it would be foolish to expect any other way to live. The world was supposed to respond harshly to such a value system, but the world did much need them for its own survival.
I took to writing, and I wrote poems which were pretty old for my age as a child. I wrote on society and politics, on the little I could understand. But I wrote in spurts, I did not write profusely. Then, stepped in Maths and I fell in love with it. For a while, I almost got disenchanted with literature. I found firmness of ground in Mathematics, on which I could stand.
The world which I had been observing from the sidelines as I child, started engulfing me. I found mockery, cruelty and in general absurdity in the world which was slowly engulfing me. I was no longer an inert outsider, who was looking at the world. I was a participant and the actor, and the script was already written by the society around me. I hated the written script which threatened to take away the spontaneity. Maths became an anchor to which I held myself in the Twister which moved ominously towards me, engulfing the whole of me.
And then, one day, fortunately, I discovered Pablo Neruda in my final year in the school. The feeble, sweet teacher, with soft voice read out, "Tonight I can write the saddest lines" and I reached out to the world around me, looking for love. I quickly fell in love and was as quickly thrown out of it, and around that time I read "The Razor's Edge" by Somerset Maugham. I was, I suppose seventeen then, about to become an Engineer. I read Maugham saying "the rain falls equally on the just and the unjust. There is no rhyme and reason for what happens in life." I blankly stared at life.
I wanted to write, but then I put my mind to becoming an engineer.
Along the way, broken hearted, with Maugham's words haunting my own existence, I moved aimlessly. Isn't this what he said?- that there is no purpose to life. We live from a day to the another until this stupid exercise is over.
I moved from one disaster to another, and barely scathed through an extracting education. I wrote in a journal and pored my pondering and my sad discoveries of life into it. I was bitter and sad and before I knew it, I was writing poetry in my dilapidated diary, on the back of Cigarette packets. I would sit on the frame less windows of the hostel room, as we did not have the luxury of the balcony, watch the smoke circle up in the air, think of Pablo Neruda and write..and bleed in words. I survived since death would not have me and I wrote. The lived with a loss of purpose, the rain kept falling on the just and unjust alike and there was no evident purpose, no grand goal to strive for. We live and we die, and then I discovered Ayn Rand with "The Fountainhead". Howard Roark spoke to me, became my friend. Mathematics and engineering were no longer enemies of poetry and literature. The architect whispered an ambition into my ears and made me bathe in a new shining light. The purpose is there, it is waiting to be discovered. We are merely too meek to believe in that purpose, that goal that objective. The choice is there with the individual, we need to be ready to pay the price of it. I shook myself up and stood up, like Roark on the edge of a cliff at the beginning of the book ready to take a leap. I decided to walk away from inertness and riding on the diary which I was filling up, love descended on to my life. I decided to be one of the Prime mover, who brought the world to a halt in The Atlas Shrugged. You can do that by making metal as well as Any Rand would tell me.
I was almost ready to swim deeper and then like an omen from the skies, during my Masters, shifted to a house, shared with other classmates. There was one cupboard barely opened by most, which was left occupied by the land lord. I opened it and found a lot of books and between them a small book called "Thus Spake Zarathustra". I had discovered Nietzsche, and it hit me like lightening. He spoke to me like a friend when the values which I learned with Ramayana and Mahabharata, were mocked by the society, and the love which I gained recently after years of solitary wandering was threatened by the society at large. He placed me on a high vantage point, from where I could look down at the society and the world at large and they really looked as flies when he spoke in a thundering voice and said-Flee, my friend, into your solitude! I see you deafened with the noise of the great men, and stung all over with the stings of the little ones. It brought great peace, I knew my way, I knew there is no 'The way' and I knew I am going to get there. Nietzsche paved way to deeper philosophy as I dug deeper into Schopenhauer and Plato and Socrates, and the world made sense. Even the no rhyme and reason logic of Maugham, made sense.
I am glad that the books I encountered in the process and I find there was some invisible force which threw in right books at the most opportune times to light up the darkest of the paths. I am still not clear why I came across the books which I did at particular point of my life, but I did find the tonic of life through these books and as Mark Twain had said- "I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." I hope the same for my daughter as she steps in the dreary world of school education. I sell technology in the day and I write during my other role. It carries the air of conspiracy and criminality with which I do my moonlighting job. I ask myself several times, if I write with a sense of petty self-importance and I honestly find that I write only because I must. But that and my Batman-esque dual life is another post, in the meantime as I keep writing, keep reading.
April 8, 2013
Book Review- The Rajor's Edge by Somerset Maugham
No one, I repeat, no one writes about the agony of youth as honestly and as brilliantly as Somerset Maugham. It is not easy for a writer to resist falling into the traps of idealism, realism, some -ism or other, and obstinately and courageously decide to tell a story as it is. The Razor's Edge is one such brutally honest story, which touches your heart with the strength of simplicity. It does not ask you to stand on the toes to watch the horizons, it sits you down holding your hands and tells the story of a difficult youth, wretched but hopeful youth.
The story spans almost the entire life of Philip, the club-footed protagonist, beginning from a melancholic childhood, following it through with a stubbornly, lonely youth till eventually he finds a resolution in the person of Sally. There is no melodrama, he narrates without any attempt to dramatize, or moralize. Maugham is a writer's writer and that shines through the simplicity with which he tells the story. There is immense beauty in truth which does not need any ornaments. You notice you are holding in your hands something divine, but not ostentatious, when the book opens with "The day broke gray and dull. The clouds hung heavily, and there was a rawness in the air that suggested snow." The words carry such expressions as if they hold your hand and guide you into a different world where not only you see the clouds, but also feel a slight cold.
The author writes about the sadness of a child who has lost her mother, without any sense of drama, as he talks of the child "deprived of the only love in the world that is quite unselfish." There are no heavy sounding words trying to extract your tears, but you find your eyes nevertheless when you read that "he wept as though his heart would break." and it isn't only Philip whose heart breaks. The affable and simple hearted Mrs Carey seems like those homely women which we encounter everyday, who find happiness in the well-being of their families and better-halves.
Maugham is a brave writer without any bravado when he writes regarding Philip who thought that, "his prayers were more acceptable to God if he said them in his nightshirt than if he waited till he was dressed." and referred to a God 'who appreciated the discomfort of his worshipers'; That was more iconoclastic than Nietzsche in a sense that it is so sweetly wrapped in a story well told and seriously felt.
Maugham plans not to become a philosopher, he enormously enjoys the multiple vantage points which being a story-teller offers him. The book is densely interspersed with deep philosophy, but what makes it great is that unlike a purely philosophical tome, this is not monolithic in view. The honesty is sometimes shockingly brutal, when Philip grows up in the middle of schoolboys cruel treatment of his physical deformity and becomes a young man searching for the meaning of life and love, both at the same time. It is shocking but in the hearts of our heart, we know it is true, kids can sometime be cruel, even more than adults.
It takes a rare innocence to delve into such human shortcoming. The death of Fannie Price is a touching episode, Philip's first real brush with death. It is sad and heart wrenching to find someone dying of starvation, so sad that even her being a failed and incompetent artist does not matter. That is followed by Phillip's woeful perusal of Mildred, a cold and scheming woman. One really wishes to hold Philip back and shake him by his shoulder as he again and again sets himself up to be betrayed by the woman. He eventually ends up starving and homeless, before rescued by the Athelny family which eventually also end up offering him love in the form of Sally, thus ending his life long search and yearning eventually.
You live your life one more time as you read this amazing book and that is the beauty of this book, it feels like it is your own life journal.
Rating- Not to be missed, you will discover the meaning of life together with Phillip.
April 5, 2013
The Constant Loser
I pick up the cards
Silently and cautiously
I watch my hand.
My glance glides
Across the table
Butterflies rise
In the abdomen,
My eye twitches
But the face struggles
To not to betray
Any emotion.
I stare at life
On the other side
Of the table
Dealing the cards
With the finesse
Of a deft player.
I pick the card
With a swift stealth
And a blank card
Stares at me.
Once again,
Another evening
I loose the game
As life stands up
With a winner's smirk,
I hold my head
Down In shame,
And prepare
For another defeat
For another evening.
Silently and cautiously
I watch my hand.
My glance glides
Across the table
Butterflies rise
In the abdomen,
My eye twitches
But the face struggles
To not to betray
Any emotion.
I stare at life
On the other side
Of the table
Dealing the cards
With the finesse
Of a deft player.
I pick the card
With a swift stealth
And a blank card
Stares at me.
Once again,
Another evening
I loose the game
As life stands up
With a winner's smirk,
I hold my head
Down In shame,
And prepare
For another defeat
For another evening.
