Do I have a Story to Tell?

Presuming that we have been bitten by the bug and in a mad rush to allow our supposed creative juices to flow, we often forget to ask ourselves the basic question whether we have a story to tell. Or more importantly do such stories that we fabricate with such fervent intensity require telling at all?

Given our hasty impulse to narrate in whichever form, spoken or written, enacted or expressed through cinematic mode, don’t we often overlook the premise or the context? The question acquires a special relevance, when we choose to narrate in a language that we were not born into. It was a language that was thankfully thrust on us by our colonial legacy. Heritage handed us our native tongue from the time we heard, understood and then babbled those words that floated around us in the immediacy of our houses. For many belonging to the elite club of ‘brown sahib bachcha party babalog and babylog’, like pet dogs they are addressed by their mummies, nannies, daddies in the now ‘not Queen’s language anymore’ but in native Indian English. For we have robbed the English of their language almost completely so, in the last quarter of the last century. Since the emergence of Salim Sinai, the Midnight’s Child, Indian writing in English has been toasted and upgraded to first class status.

It’s not that no one dared to write in English before the Satanic Generation of typists with frenetic pace, sitting before the starchy page and creating the word as a visual image on the screen rather than the shared intimacy of the paper with the pen. Overwriting, disfiguring words liked no longer and using arrows or asterisks to mark corrections, has almost faded from memory for our generation. At best they use the pen to sign loan documents or to sign cheques and autographs. It was not as if the fountain pen pushing natives had nothing to do with the language before. Bankim Chandra, the first Indian novelist wrote his first novel Rajmohan’s Wife in English two centuries ago; Madhusudan Dutt first tried his hand at verse in English before he retracted to write in his native tongue. Tagore won the Nobel for his own arcane, archaic and quaint translation of his collected songs, Geetanjali. The Mulk Raj Anand’s, R.K. Naryanan’s and Khuswant Singh’s espousing neo realistic, humanistic and simplistic texts were published by the local press as in those days since it was deemed as a politically correct thing to do for writers from the ex colonies. Some even managed to be bequeathed with pithy epithets and sundry praises from the Commonwealth.

Then Rushdie and the entire generation rose with Salim Sinai’s nose and Indian writing in English was celebrated with great hurrah and hullabaloo by the Brits and more. The Booker was the colonial pat on the back for those, ‘blighty fellas who learned our language rather well eh!’. Literary agents descended on Indian shores in hordes in search of such precious, precocious talent – the blessed few with fantastic stories to tell. Unheard of amounts were reportedly (as journalistic parlance puts it) doled out as advances so the writers could retire to places as queer as Malibu or Scottish castles to spin yarns about the magical, mythical India of snake charmers and rope tricks or about quaint urban universes peopled with garrulous storytelling mad hatter decrepit uncles with fetishes or neighbours who love to dig their noses while retelling their sexual odysseys, to cut a long story short, essentially tales with third world recipes. For Indian exotica--- Goa, the backwaters of Kerala, by lanes of Byculla and Lama Boys at Dharamsala, nowadays sell well. So do tales about spices, myths of djinns, sahibs fornicating with brown girls or gay princes’ pining for their macho malishwala lovers, the aroma of frangipani, the succulence of farsan, the tantric rituals and yogic postures, pearls of Zen mouthed by shepherds. The West relishes such Karmic colas with a dash of Kamasutra thrown in here and there to add the essential erotic twist to soul searching mumbo jumbo.

This is not a diatribe against the entire community of authors who have carved their place in literary history without the condescension of this two pice anonymous writer’s banal banter. Rushdie, Seth, Amitav Ghosh or Arundhati Roy’s singular gem can survive beyond the jejune criticism of frustrated cynical critics who are not blessed with the felicity of playing ping pong with language with such feline splendour. Sadly enough they to have to succumb to the need of the hour and recede to the backwaters of Kerala, the Sunderbans inhabited by Royal Bengal Tigers and Mohua collectors, drawing rooms of the mad Bawas of Bombay, the valleys of Kashmir or the old world charm of Calcutta infested with its Bhadraloks and aunts frying fluffy luchis to ensnare the Western reader hungry for quaintness and otherness. It is ironic that even those who command such hefty advances that can fetch villas in France and yachts on the Mediterranean have to yield to the diktats of publishers and literary agents guiding them about stories to tell.

This is not such an uncommon phenomenon as we might be fooled to believe in. Patrons through centuries have had made to order works of art that are celebrated as masterpieces. Leonardo, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Tagore have had to sing paeans with paint, stone or words about potentates who helped them flourish. Even the virulent Ted Hughes eventually had to accept the anachronistic title of Poet Laureate before he died. That is not the point. Don’t we all cow down or buckle under pressure of ground reality. But doe that stop weavers of yarns from telling tales that go beyond jargon and verbiage? What happens to the angst of the present times; the reality of the now seeking surreal expression?

On the other side of the spectrum you have Shobhaa De and her brigade of brigand raconteurs who thrive on trivia, sleaze and kitsch. The murky tales of perversities lived in mansions of the rich and famous, the wild parties featured on page three become the subject that sells following the footsteps of American bestsellers. Those are vapid tales of so called urban ennui, mere gibberish best meant for gossip glossies, now published as stories that will change lives forever ---huh! Chetan Bhagat who cannot construct a sentence that will leave a lasting impression heads the bestseller list week after week with his gawky college kid prose. The powerlessness of the narrative in this segment calls for public flogging.

So where does that leave us in search of a voice that will tell us about our predicament without seeking recourse in esoterica? Beyond myths of exotic opulence there exist two parallel streams of contemporary reality; the metropolitan dilemma of corrosive lives, the power games of economics, politics and cultural hegemony alongside the subaltern reality of class struggle, racial strife, fundamentalism, casteist and gender politics. Where does that fit into or figure in the matrix of narratives written in English in the present times.

With slight knowledge of vernacular literature, Rushdie dismissed the entire corpus of literature written in several Indian languages. This is a blemish of those who live lives severed from the immediacy of circumstance. The contemporary masters of fiction in regional languages are continuously coming up with gems chronicling passages of contemporary Indian history in the making offering rare insights into the human predicament. They largely go unnoticed beyond the immediate environment of their specific cultures, for sheer lack of translations. Young writers who both familiar with their works and blessed with the felicity of conjuring words in English choose to hone their skills as original authors as the moolah and universal recognition lies in that realm. Forget the classic case of Russian, French or German masters who have been translated so adeptly, one often wonders what would have happened to contemporary masters like Marquez or Kundera had they not been translated with such fecundity?

Admitted, that the onomatopoeic resonances of myriad languages of million hues are culture specific. That is exactly why the lyrical mysticism of Tagore remains shrouded in mystery for the likes of Khushwant Singh who dismiss his greatness. Yet today, the English reader is familiarizes herself or himself with quaint words courtesy an appended glossary. Those stories thirst for retelling and never reach the universe they so hauntingly sketch. For lack of a suitable translator, the Marquez’s of our world are lost for the rest of the world. More than the burning desire to tell a story, the ambidextrous Indian authors with a fair command over both English and the vernacular languages they were born into, now want to bask in the new found glory of originality and fame that comes with well marketed fiction in English from India.

One wonders what impetus prompts those translators who rework texts of European or South American or even Japanese and Chinese masters to indulge in such an exercise. Maybe it’s a vicious cycle – the glory of the first endeavour at translation might have yielded profits and that goads them on to attempt the next best work and so the cycle continues and a whole industry thrives on translations and handsome advances and royalties received and shared with the authors. But is it merely the lure of lucre that turns the wheel continuously? But a nagging doubt still persists whether such a literary attempt has only got to do fat pay cheques. Or is it the desire to help the story an international passage simply because the translator believes in and is inspired by the text. The truth lies somewhere in between.

One is reminded of the German poet Heinriz Heine’s famous lines where he proclaims that those who seek originality should chew a spider’s web since that is a completely original product secreted from the spider’s womb; but he loved his honey knowing fully well every drop is stolen from the pollen of flowers. The visual arts don’t need paraphrasing as they are self explanatory though culture specific subtexts can yield extra pleasure with a critic’s note; subtitling cinema is by far an easier job, though the culture specificity does get lost at times. But with literature it’s totally different. Literary works are often transcreated to suit the felicity of the language it is translated in and is by far a more daunting enterprise. Though fame is in short supply for such an effort, creative satisfaction surely isn’t. What else prompts this exercise where financial returns are not that lucrative? It must be the pride those interpreters take in reaching out what they savour in their native tongue. Beyond ephemeral glory there is a genuine need felt, to reach out those stories in the alien language they are familiar with or if they have learnt the alien language and have fallen in love with it, they want to share the experience of masterpieces of the acquired language with people who can only read such translations in their native languages.

An able translator does not merely become a word processor replacing sentences of the original language with words from the language they are translated from. Often, they transmute the ideas of a particular culture specific language to make it palpable for those for whom the cultural sub texts may be lost otherwise. At times they retain the original words of the original text for the sheer beauty of its sound and sibilance and add a glossary to explain a particular word with a phrase to make the foreign word understood. Sometimes, the inflexions of idiomatic expressions peculiar to the original language are changed to retain the flavour of the idea contained in those expressions. There content becomes more important for better communication. The role of the translator is that of a re-interpreter rather than that of a mere facilitator. Images, ideas and formal constructs are transliterated to embellish the original text. When Boris Pasternak translated Shakespeare into Russian, he created a whole new dimension by adding resonances peculiar to his own language. Shakespeare was made more intimate for the reader and Hamlet’s existential angst acquired equal poignancy.

The problem we face in India is that most authors with authority and command over English, most of those who have studied in Christian Missionary, Anglo Indian schools, have slight or virtually no knowledge about the written text in their mother tongues though they speak it at home, that too very sparingly. We don’t have writers of the caliber of a Pasternak who can easily straddle both the worlds with equal dexterity. On the other hand, the acknowledged masters in regional languages feel intimidated to translate their own works despite some of them having a moderate command over English. They fear chastisement from their own stock and shy away from translating their own works. They feel the intensity of their expressions just might be lost if they attempted to transcreate their own texts. Even Tagore stopped translating his own works after a point when he was criticized for his efforts. Tagore’s archaic and Victorian knowledge of English prevented his translations from becoming contemporary.

Inter language translations have been widely practiced with texts of regional languages being successfully translated into other Indian languages. Sarat Chandra and Prem Chand have been virtually translated in all the major Indian languages. Celebrated English, French, German and Russian classics have been translated into Indian languages by celebrated writers poets and academics but not vice versa. The convenient excuse that such works are simply untranslatable is a bandwagon we need to abandon. If Baudelaire or Rilke could be translated with such grace why not a Jibanananda Das or a Vaikam Bashir or Amrita Pritam. The initiative by the Sahitya Academy, the government body which has attempted such an onerous task has by and large been a disaster as these works were commissioned to pedantic professors of English Literature in government colleges. With due respect accorded to them, these academics often turn to pedagogues and most of the times have no flair for conjuring regional texts into contemporary English as their education has made them stick to an effete and long dead language. The English they learnt and teach is anachronistic in a modern world. Most of the times, they have no connect with the contemporary modes of expression. Having taught Edmund Spenser or Keats for thirty years, their senses are dulled and the magic of an ever evolving language is lost on most of them. They might be able to offer collated critical insights into the works of a Byron, Pope or Donne but most of them cannot even relate to anything written post the Second World War. Caught in a time warp, they are still stuck in the ‘Queen’s language’ mode.

Those rare writers who are blessed with the felicity of prancing words can just spare some time and thought, dispossess themselves from the burden of individuality and originality and journey through the texts of regional masters and create for them a window to the world. In doing so, this new breed can truly embellish their own repertoire. We are waiting for that realization to dawn. The world will savour the heritage of stories already told and relish them as new. The connoisseurs owe this much to the civilization to which they belong.

My Notion of a Nation

In a world of pan pizzas and Mac burgers do I really have any country left for me? The pithy Americanism ‘go global, think local’ is commonly used to justify the erosion of geographical boundaries. Else why should a paneer pizza or for that matter a Mac- Aloo tikki burger sell more than the authentic originals? Why are fully fried steaks a big hit with the urban Indian palate? For individuals, the microcosm of their immediate environment is of far greater significance and consequence than a macrocosmic ‘weltanschauung’. Woodrow Wilson with his misplaced and lofty notions of a utopian world thought of the concept of a League of Nations which history proved was a timeless blunder. That did not deter the combined will of wily politicians to create an effete Union Nations built on the debris of Wilson’s dreams. I began with the analogy of fast food as I strongly believe that the specificity of any culture is truly defined by its gastronomical uniqueness apart from its other sundry racial characteristics like behavioral patterns and language.

Jingoism has reduced us to revel as Indians only when Sachin Tendulkar scores his thirty-sixth test century or Amitabh Bachchan’s wax replica finds a place at Madam Tussad’s. We tend to overlook the fact that cricket sponsorship thrives only because the largest number of people who watch cricket on television are Indians and by sheer numbers the spending capacity of the average Indians on tooth paste or an economy car is the highest in the cricket viewing world and most of the tickets sold at the Wax Museum in London are bought by gaping Asian tourists with a distinct colonial hangover and these same people worship Bachchan as a demi-god. Even the maudlin excess of Swades and the concept of ‘desi’ among non residents everywhere work basically on the premise of nostalgia of a land they have left. In reality, they pine for the intimacy of their native place of origin, more specifically the immediate neighbourhood, they have abandoned, family and friends they have forsaken for better prospects in an alien environment and the sentimental excesses attached to local rituals and ceremonies, home made food and their mothers’ recipes. When they do visit their countries, they soon feel suffocated after a while and inevitably visit their revered motherland with confirmed return tickets.

Except the top brass political leadership who thrive on the concept of a nation for survival, how many people in the world today seriously think and are proud of being a citizen of whichever country they belong to by virtue of their birth or passports? Before lynching me for espousing such a thought put a hand to your heart and ask yourself in a moment of introspection whether you really belong to any one country anymore? This is not meant to be a diatribe against the splendid notion of nationhood and a clarion call for anarchy to reign supreme, for I too believe than an ordered universe is essential for civilization to progress. I have not lost faith in the spirit of nobility, the ability to rise and react to circumstance that surround or afflict your immediate environment. I am not advocating a philistine, lotus eating morbid philosophy of inaction, apathy and non-committal posturing. Here I use the first person singular not for personal aggrandizement or to espouse a quasi neo Nazi philosophy to accelerate any personal agenda but merely to reinforce a point of faith.

If individuals do not function collectively, the world order would collapse. Nihilism cannot make humanity function even at the basic level of the simple piety of everyday, humdrum survival. Mouths need to be fed, babies need to be nourished, young minds need to be ignited and the body politic needs to work for economic, scientific, technological, intellectual and cultural progress of the community. The community I reiterate is distinct from the narrow confines of a nation. The concept of a “Nation State’ has outlived its utility since its emergence in the nineteenth century Europe where the political climate of the day necessitated a racial divide based on language and ethnic groups. That need no longer exists especially in a multilingual, multicultural country like India where even the dialect and food habits of a distinct racial group differ every hundred kilometers.

Plurality of cultures and their co-existence is the reality of the day. From the now extinct World Trade Centre to the confines of any multinational organization in the remote corners of the third world, the Chinese executives rub shoulders with their local counterparts, Sikhs and Bangladeshi cab drivers taxi around the busy streets of New York with Australian or Swahili passengers. They are jubilant when by sheer accident their fellow brethren hop into their vehicles and they can lapse into merry banter in their native tongue. The emotional connect is always within a narrow parameter. However, the dichotomy of peaceful co-existence and parochialism don’t are not necessarily at loggerheads. A Filipino worker at a sweatshop in Chicago raises a toast with his Cuban comrade or a Bihari migrant to Mumbai may visit a beer bar with a local Marathi but at home they will practice their region specific rituals of worship, cooking and social mores like they did in their villages. A devout Muslim will say his Nawaz five times a day in Belgium; a traditional Hindu Brahmin will recite his Gayatri daily. Today’s individual is well versed with the practice of a dual life. So while they might display a wide variety of cosmopolitan attitudes while conducting business or interacting with co workers, inside their inner sanctum sanctotum, they will faithfully abide by age old tradition or practices. That does not discount the fact many Muslims eat pork chops and Brahmins relish beef steaks. In that duality, the post structural universe survives.

One certainly needs to experiment with a variety of food to broaden one’s mindset. Petty parochialism should not make you survive only on dosas, machcher jhol or tandoori chicken all through your life. That dulls your senses and makes you remain a frog in the well forever. I revert to the analogy of food yet again to rubbish the current trend of blending cuisines in the name of experimenting with exotica and propounding the thesis of the new Nation State of a Global Village. All you gastronomes will agree, the succulence of a particular combination works, others don’t. You can cook mutton with bitter gourd for all I care and spill mayonnaise over it, but make sure to go to Iceland and dare to sell it to Eskimos. Don’t blame me if they chase you with their harpoons. On a more serious note, you surely understand the essence of this bizarre recipe. The chicken tikka kebab might have become the national food of Britain, but then consider the fact that many residents of England are not English anymore. The cliché of United States being a melting pot of cultures became passé half a century back. There is no sacrosanct nation left anymore except maybe The Vatican which is essentially a theocratic state.

Paradoxically the alternative reality of a Global Village is also hogwash. Despite having usurped Mother Teresa as Indian was she truly only an Indian? Only after being de- Indianized did Amartya Sen develop the objectivity of seeing through the façade of the argumentative Indian. Salman Rushdie or a Vikram Seth could observe social mores and phenomenon with such clarity of vision and write about it so eloquently only after migrating from India. But have they become Americans or Britishers? Is Arundhati Roy anymore a mere Indian despite choosing to live in India? By becoming truly ‘nowhere people’ have they developed an insight that is uniquely individual and at the same time universal. They have become nation states as individuals.

That brings me to the crux of my proposition. In the recent past in my capacity as a talk show host I decided to interview the average Indian on their concept of a nation. I had the rare privilege of speaking to eminent thinkers, writers, artists and several common people on the roads from a wide variety of social strata. I was pleasantly surprised by their myriad responses to the concept of India as a nation. While the intellectuals spoke about diverse and distinctly different notions of their ides of India, most of the people from the lowest rung society when questioned what their ‘desh’ (read native land) was, mentioned the names of the villages or at best districts to which they belonged. The nonagenarian yet ever alert and acerbic Khuswant Singh said India meant different sounds for him, the legendary danseuse Sonal Man Singh defined Indians by their body language, the venerated anthropologist Dipankar Gupta referred to the collective subconscious of the narrow racial coteries that defines the essence of the polyvalence of the core Indian dilemma. There was no consensus either among the intellectual elite or the common person on the streets about the notion of nationhood. Is there any nationhood left in India anymore? The simplistic age old answer to this would be that India operates with the supreme irony of unity in diversity. India was never a nation before independence from British rule. Even secondary level school students are aware that the success of imperial rule in India was due to the divide and rule policy. India was a loose conglomeration of states, several of which refused to bow down to the pressures of its colonial rulers. The Nizam territory had to be annexed using guile and what many term deceit. Goa, Pondicherry and finally Sikkim also joined the Union much after independence. Kashmir was given special status even when the constitution was being formulated. All this is text book knowledge that needs no reaffirmation. Even debate about the division of India to appease minority sentiment and douse ambitions of the then political hierarchy has become stale to the point of becoming putrid at present. So exactly when was there one India since recorded history?

When there is no concept of nationhood left in the imperialist first world anymore despite lesser diversity in terms of linguistic and cultural divides, why do we have to force such an effete and anachronistic notion down our gullet? We have spent sufficient thought and proposed our thesis about the larger agenda. Let us now be circumspect and move to a more introspective plane.

Let us for a moment forget the larger national picture and concentrate on regional divides. In the last twenty five years divisive forces have been constantly raising their heads with disastrous consequences. Forget the demand for separate nationhood for Khalistan, Kashmir, Nagaland, Bodoland and the Assam insurgency, even in the otherwise apparently pacifist state of West Bengal with a stable single party rule for the last thirty three years(a record of sorts) the demand for Gorkhaland and Kamtapuri pose constant threats. Now the Maoist movement has turned West Bengal into a virtual terror state The government had to yield to separatist demands and create the truncated states of Uttaranchal, Jharkhand and Chattisgarh to appease popular sentiment in those regions only because they did not choose to go out of the union and remained content with narrower regional divides within the sovereign nation. The movement for Telengana has set Andhra Pradesh on fire. As mentioned earlier, every hundred kilometers, the dialect changes, so do social mores and attitudes. The concept of the undivided joint family, intrinsic to the Hindu way of life for centuries too is a thing of the past. Within nuclear families the compatibility between partners are breaking down. This is a world wide phenomenon. So what state or nation is eventually left for us even when we cannot survive within the minimum basic unit of two? The binary equation too is eroding. There are no easy answers for these posers. Ultimately we are reduced to the statehood of being just one individual.

Within that individual too there are schizophrenic divides. What I was when I begun writing is no longer the same be as my basic metabolic process has changed me within even this short span. Am I myself a nation unto myself? That is the scariest thought. If I cannot become a nation unto myself how will the social order survive? That is where we need to address the issue today. Unless I become constant despite the divisive forces of doubt that assail me and tear me asunder to become several, how will I be a part of a larger social fabric? This occurrence could go well beyond laissez faire. There is the imperative need to unite. I have to retain my own essential sanity and function as a cohesive whole for me to connect to and maintain a sane world order. For that first and foremost I need to become a nation unto myself. The league of nations can be built brick by brick only is each of us consider ourselves to be individual nations. For that I need to look inwards and realize my positioning the larger scheme of things. If I let myself go, how will I ever be able to reach out to a second individual?

For that we need to redefine our place in the universe and start from the concept of individual nationhood. We spoke of some eminent Indians and referred to them by defining them in a way that is always termed in the pejorative context as being ‘nowhere people’. I think we need to re-evaluate the notion of nothingness and call it the zero state. That state needs to be seen as what the ancient Greeks defined as a state of ‘ataraxia’ which in common parlance would mean a state of peace that passeth understanding; the closest Sanskrit term for it would be ‘shantih’ – the state of perfect poise. By becoming the great dove unified in vision we can again rise from being individuals to become a collective whole. By realizing and becoming one within ourselves can we step forward from being to becoming. Like the mythical ‘Great Swan’ Paramhansa can we separate milk from water with our magical beaks and understand the need to create a cohesive union in the larger world order. We can look beyond the narrow confines of our personal states and reach out to one another. Through simple acts of goodness and actuating our aspirations not for ourselves alone can we rebuild the matrix from the singular state. The rest is bound to follow.

I begin by becoming my own nation and worshipping the sovereignty and limitless potential of my own humble self.

Punctuations

Life for the contemporary man has become like the writings of e e cummings, bereft of any capitals or punctuation marks. It is one ceaseless flow of words and deeds, forever treading familiar territories without any impetus to just stop, stand by and observe. Participating in the action is deemed as the only correct thing to do. This deluge prevents extra attention to any one given aspect. Hence no need for capitals to mark beginnings, no italics to mark departures, no semi-colons, and even no full stops to mark halting. Just flow like a river, is a simile often used to justify this way of living: a mighty simile from which incurable optimists draw inspiration. Civilization grew along riverbanks and hence the application of the river principle is considered appropriate.

The life of a human being is unfortunately not a river. It is a conglomeration of disorder. A whole lifetime is spent to bring about order and give shape to this amorphous mass. For that the rules of grammar were invented. Not merely for textbook knowledge but in the larger scheme of things, grammar was meant as a metaphor for servicing life.

Each distinct sentence of life needs its proper punctuation. Or else meanings can change. Then hark, what discord follows! The exclamation of the previous sentence if altered to a full stop, changes the tenor of the thought concealed in it. The drama of life thus needs exact punctuation marks. Let us ponder for a while on a life without question marks. The whole purpose of existence is defeated. Knowledge is approached with a whole series of questions. Without a question mark it seems to be a conclusion rather than an enquiry. It simply does not progress.

The significance of a full stop cannot be overlooked. What if life progressed without it? There would be no distinct meaning left to any thought or expression. It would be a wild medley of words without meaning. Even for that matter a mere comma: that too is essential to give structure to a proposed thought. The point of emphasis is created through the use of commas in life. One often mistakes any punctuation as a barrier and wishes to do away with it. It is not a barrier but a catalyst for more effective expression. Through the correct use of such marks one might conduct life better. The geometry of life attains symmetry and harmony with it.

The quest for perfection in life can be attained through the exact usage of punctuations that bear resemblance to those encrypted in grammar books. Just as mathematics defines life so does its kindred discipline, grammar. Mathematics operates through definitive laws through the application of which standard conclusions can be derived. Of this branch of study, geometry provides the nearest similitude with grammar. Geometric laws are determined through precise measurements, the slightest aberration of which can cause the law applied, to fail. So is the case with grammar. A tense gone awry can cause the dead to live and an adverb can make an adjective frown.

Many might argue that such childish far-fetched similarities between grammar and real life are not warranted in an age when the angst of existence has also been lost. This is not a fetish one wishes to pursue. It is merely an endeavour to discover a pattern to behaviour and thereby seek solutions through some logical laws rather than the hocus pocus of god men steering society to live life through hogwash.

To emulate the example of a perfect grammatical construction, life need follow only the punctuations in their spirit and not through exactitude. There are no exacts in life. A few micro-millimetres here or there can alter the course of human history in the individual sense of the term. But the discernable beauty of a well-constructed sentence can also be attempted in life.

It is all about learning to where to draw the line and where to extend it.

Why am I attached to my pair of jeans?

It’s not that I am bereft of choices

I have several trousers in my cupboard

Few fancy ones that I reserve for events

The rest completely functional for any purpose

Why then do I stick to my pair of dark blue jeans?

Simple they are comfortable, not so simple, a deeper meaning perhaps

A swine like me pretending to be intellectual will formulate, will postulate

A thesis for something that does not have need any jejune symbolism

Gloat over insignificance and jump deliriously for being so clever, clever.

Fact is jeans are not worthy enough to espouse a philosophy about

Jeans are carnal and canine like bite into your skins and don’t let go

Jeans become akin to the body and yet relieve you from the sorry of nudity

They salivate and glue like stick to your calves without support of dogma.

My jeans carry my secrets, they have access to the darkest moments of mine

Like the faithful old bulldog they don’t ever question the validity of my faith

Their tactile connect keeps on reminding me of the vacuousness of existence

Instilling complacency well beyond belief in institutions that are dysfunctional.

My jeans define who I am underlining my essential hollowness and vapidity

My politics, my religion, my cinema, my sexuality, are all encoded in them

Arousals, ejaculations, flaccidity, virility, vanity, vigour, cowardice and more

Without my jeans I will become a glass without water, a body without a soul.

My jeans are meant to keep me alive and so I choose them.

Knowledge in a Nutshell

A friend of mine prompted the thought. We indulge in our ritualistic conversations, in darkness. As I lie in my bed enveloped by night, our parleys unfold. My friend, whom I have affectionately nicknamed Doctor (he is a doctorate in mathematics), has provoked me into thinking about sundry expressions in the media, which are often celebrated as insights. The quality of insight, observes my friend, is now measured either in column centimeters or programming space on television rather than in the reams of yore. Distracters might argue that brevity is the soul of wit and “one has to strike the nail on its head” etc. They simply tend to forget that it is not applied where it is imperative—the files in government departments and in the innumerable courts of law. It is more convenient now to apply it to the sphere of what is ambiguously called the area of social sciences or matters pertaining to human behaviour and indiscretion.

Human mores as such form an amorphous mass. Culture specifies its categorizations and no mathematical constants or paradigms can be imposed as superstructures under which human attitudes can be quantified and studied according to universally applicable phenomenon. Doctor has rather succinctly hit the nail on its head by pointing out that all such pursuits are now restricted to a few columns in newspapers or the noise filled debates in television studios. Within this ambit our theorists jam-pack all possible points of view on the subject under scrutiny. People have no need to explore further.

Armed with this knowledge, journalists and the ubiquitous television anchors can expound for hours at conferences, seminars and debate on TV channels about matters concerning the human predicament and deconstruct social malaise with fecundity. Till the eighties of the last century, seekers of the dark enchantment of the forbidden fruit would debunk the felicity of such vacuous pebble collection as “THE ILLUSTRATED WEEKLY “way of viewing life. In retrospect, many are prompted to eat their humble pie given the present context. Even the so-called articles of the erstwhile magazine seem like precious pearls of wisdom compared to the verbiage being spewed now with an eponymous apology of being an article or an expert’s opinionating with pithy catch phrases referred to as sound bytes on television.

Article by virtue of its microcosmic existence is supposed to concentrate on particles of thought, at best leading to a conclusion on a specific issue. Through a flagrant disregard for custom and propriety, the propounders of such post-modern haiku wisdom, tom-tom their collated points of view as insight. Societies and cultures are thus defined through vigorous brush strokes of platitudes. Only the correct coinage of words and clever-clever idiomatic twists are considered masterstrokes of the imagination, seeking answers through mere causality. The byte needs the adequate bite to leave an impact.

Unfortunately, knowledge can no longer hold its sway in the face of such an onslaught.

Such vapidity is defended through the power of the spoken word. The drama of the voice has staged a coup in the silent corridors of reticent seekers. “They are men who indulge in barren scholasticism” is a common criticism heaped upon those who do not revel in the ephemeral limelight of recognition through carefully orchestrated media campaigns. For them those few columns or minutes of air time is all that is required to pass sweeping judgment about civil mores and the collective psyche of a vastly divergent population.

Articles and opinions of news anchors have become sacrosanct and are recognized by authority as harbingers of wisdom and insight. They have replaced the archaic essay as vessels of venture. To essay a thought meant journeying through the idea. No one is now interested in journeys any further. Humanity needs destinations, not sojourns. Hence the process of exploring a thought can be peremptorily dispensed with. What does the thought lead to, is the only area of concern. The byline that adorns the masthead, or the telegenic quality of the presenter if of primal importance: the drama, diatribe and dialogue are all built around that cleverly woven epithet. Hence algebras of infinite logic emanate from mouths forever ready to spout the WORD. Ironically, it turns the myth of the word as Brahman on its head. The word is now a bomb with which you seek attention. It is longer a vehicle to communicate thought. The articles and debates are just word vessels. They carry words, not thoughts.

In this age of recipes for simplicities articles and television shows are celebrated as instruments to propagate faith of the new order. Dogma replaces enquiry. Conclusions have to be drawn. Explanations are vital for the existence of phenomenon. They can be derived upon through easy avenues. No need to ruminate, ponder and waste valuable time seeking to grasp polyvalent layers of abstract, esoteric aspects of existence. Definition is the mantra that characterizes our times. Pose pertinent questions and seek answers that can be applied to everyday living. Read or watch before breakfast or be lullabyed away after dinner. Then go off to sleep, sound in knowledge that tomorrow newer insights are going to be provided with your morning cup of tea.

Pursuit without purpose does not beget any benefit. There is no need to pursue further. After all, what wisdom has the world gained after such futile efforts? The anomalies of the pre-historic times still exist----the wars, famines, misery, poverty remain the same. The new tribe does not wish to tackle such contentious issues beyond a superficial overview. At best they tow the populist line by arousing and inciting passion. They never ask anyone to brood. It is never ever said, “Give it a thought!” Rather the attitude is, “We have already thought it for you, just read and agree.”

The avowed purpose is to reach conclusions. If perchance another point of view emerges, there is always another scope provided either by column centimeters forever hungry for more words or air time that forever needs to be filled 24/7. Lines have to be written or spoken to fulfill the appetite of the ogre called media. The spirit of enquiry was the forte of idle minds. People who had the time to speculate, thought about things other than ingredients of daily livelihood. Now it is a commissioned job, which is bound by deadlines. You are paid to think for the masses. You have to provoke thoughts to provide solutions, to appease your readers and viewers. It is all a game of figures reflected in your readership surveys and TRPS. There is no further need to explore merely for the sake of exploration. Need is the only required basis. Spirit and its quest can be wished away or exorcized. In a defined universe, there is simply nothing left to be chanced upon.

I did not begin by trying to reach somewhere. Hence my friend, the Doctor and I are where we were. Only giving poor knowledge mere acknowledgement and thanking it for giving us the immense power to ponder over temporary defeats such as these. Quite quixotically, we yet fantasize about winning the war. Meanwhile, knowledge has been merrily gift wrapped in a nutshell.

Zeroing In

Imagine you are standing in an apple orchard. Your hand has to only lift itself about half a metre above your head and you can pluck an apple and lustily chew it. Or better still that huge refrigerator which is parked in your living room. Just pull open the door and the seams burst with goodies that you take in front of your television set and munch at, like a blob, as you watch The Simpson’s up to their madness. All that is readily available, well within your grasp, as you go through the daily ritual of living.

Not when you sit in the loo exerting your energies to help those excreta out of your system. You put in enormous effort and exhale and yet it simply refuses to come out of your system, simply because, you are constipated. The Herculean energy, which you exhaust in trying to bring that out, is no mean effort. That is the force you have to exert and the farce you will have to endure in order to understand life.

When a King asked his Court Jester, how he felt on hearing about the birth of the crown prince, the Jester replied that he felt as relieved and as happy as he did after a good shit. The mighty monarch was much offended. The Jester meekly requested the King to go with him for a boat ride the very next morning. The King consented before ordering the Jester to the gallows. The next morning as they were about to set for the journey, the Jester prevented the King from entering the loo. The King obliged, as he had to settle scores. Midstream, the king felt the urgent call of nature. But the Jester continued rowing upstream much to the consternation of the King. The Monarch was in great agony. He pleaded with the Jester to take the boat ashore. After much persuasion, the Jester steered the boat to the shore. The King jumped off the boat and ran for the bushes. When he came back, the Jester quietly enquired how the Monarch felt. The King had a mighty laugh and gifted the Jester many jewels.

That feeling of bliss very few people feel in a lifetime. That is a mighty feeling of contentment. In a world full of unhappy people, remedies such as these seem the only solution to lives besot with troubles. That exclusive feeling of bliss after a good crap. Do not ever underestimate the enormity of such a rare pleasure. That is the time when the mind is truly at rest. It is much more than an orgasm. Enjoy it!

Unfortunately we do not know well enough to count our blessings. We always treat life as a mystic force, which great thinkers have tried to probe, grapple with and failed. Life is where it is. Simple and unassuming. You only need to grasp its essence. The pure bliss of a good crap can never be underestimated. In the bull crap of the universe, your simple personal crap can give you supreme satisfaction. Try it out. That is the only recipe for happiness. Crap and be happy. Take the shit out of your system. Outrageous yet true!

We are too loaded with crappy notions that need to be shat out before we understand the essence of life. Flush out the crap you were loaded with before you eat your next meal. Make sure what you eat this time around gives you the sheer pleasure of emptiness as soon as you wake up. For only then can you live the rest of the day feeling fresh and invigorated.

That is why we need to start on ground zero. The crap of all our yesterdays gone, we can approach life with greater vigour and energy. To begin with chapter one would mean you start with a premise that already exists. There will then be remnants of a past life. We don’t want that. For aren’t we here to start life afresh. We have to work towards that stage where we start believing as if life didn’t exist beyond this moment. Feeling like newborn babies can we try to understand the patterns that were beyond our understanding even yesterday?

Today is the time. Now is the moment. So we are here on the perfect ground. That is ZERO. What a number!!!! That is what makes the world go round. The perfect circle. Don’t worry, we are not here to go round and round in circles. It is the circle that makes life perfect. The moment you ascribe numbers to life and situations, you deprive the moment and situation of the greater magic and fun of being. Only after you “BE” then you become. So let us start by BEING. That is the beginning premise; and what a better way than to start from zero. The neutral point gives you the balance to see the world from afar. Only zero is that state. No qualities or attributes. You can meditate in perfect poise and behold the total picture.

Let not any emotion or thought taint this moment. Dispossess yourself. When the mind is an empty slate you can allow nothing to happen. Only when nothing happens can you understand the quality of living and being. So remember. Just BE. Start with a zero. Only then can you proceed further. If you are bored with the crap by now, retire to the loo. Have a good crap and continue with your life.

Chapter Zero

What you may ask is the logic in starting on ground zero? Well unless you start there, you may never reach infinity, which is where I wish to take you to at the end of this exercise. Does that sound a tall claim? I’m sure it does, but unless you aspire for that coveted goal, in all probabilities you not even end up reaching finite solutions to the everyday phenomenon of the mighty mystery called life.

Here have we just begun to ponder on the magic and mystery of that vessel with which you breathe with as you read these printed letters across the pages. I am here to share my thoughts on the passage of that vessel called life, through the turbulent waters of living and existing. I am here to talk about sailing smoothly till you reach your banks and eventually attain your much-deserved rest, which the Greeks called Ataraxia and the Hindus call Shantih. This blog is not meant to teach you easy recipes for attaining that state of perfect calm and ‘peace that passeth understanding’. My avowed purpose is to share the secrets of a sailor who has tried to steer his ship of life through storms and lulls, through windy nights and tranquil days.

Let me state at the outset there are no ready mantras for such journeys. There are no Reader’s Digest suggestions like 10 tips to make marriages work. It is through a clear perception and understating the nature of the currents of the water, the weathercock realisation of the passage of winds that you will learn the laws if there are any. And let me warn you there are no fixed laws that are applicable for all vessels through all waters.

So we start from the Zero state. That is the state that you have to attune the mind to, to understand the harmonics of the melody of life.

We begin with the premise of life a melody to be sung with effortless ease once you perfect the notes. We do not prescribe to the standard pattern of just seven notes as prescribed by laws of music. Those unsung notes beyond those seven are the ones that breathe life into life. Let us explore those notes.

Have you ever seen a lotus blooming in a pond? The symphony of the moment of bloom is an unsung melody that creates a moment of perfection. The single bobbing sound as the lotus bursts open gives breath the majestic phenomenon of being. We will aspire to being and becoming beyond the monotony of merely living. It is the note before DO or SA… it is the note the serves as the prelude to the melody. A lotus attains beauty after the bloom. But to partake of that beauty, we have to observe the precise moment when it actually begins to be beautiful. Almost like observing the moment when the caterpillar transforms itself into a butterfly. That minute moment of transition from just being to becoming is the zero state from which we begin our journey.

Be prepared to venture into the unknown. This is not a journey fraught with fears. Let your mind meditate on nothingness….. concentrate on the ZERO…. the OM…. the perfect word without meaning. Don’t seek meaning. For if you do, you might just find none. If there is no expectation, you might just chance upon magic.

From this moment there is no author, no guide. It is only YOU. This is your blog, your passage. Here I will perform the vanishing act and let you be with yourself. The magic is about to begin. So fasten your seat belts and get ready for your flight.

Whoosh!!!!!!!!! I am no longer there from here.