Tagged: Musings
On Heroes
I was talking to an elderly lady whose late father had been an officer in the British Raj. In his library, she had come across a book about a certain Indian politician of the past century. She spoke highly of this man and assumed that he was still regarded as someone on a pedestal in India. Now I had grown up listening to several school speeches on his many virtues. The teachers composed and sang songs about his greatness. As idealistic undergraduates, we had once celebrated his birthday in the hostel. Roads around the country are named after him. My great-uncles named their houses after him. I had been repulsed reading the vitriol spewed on him by a foul-mouthed leftist poet who sang the praises of his contemporary leftist politician in the same breath. Then I had chanced upon the truth about both of these politicians who had been hailed as leaders in their time and wasn’t sure who was the worse of the two.
Naturally I did not mention any of this to the lady. I merely said that notwithstanding the ideals that fake historians had attached to his name and his many statues, everyone now knew who and what he really was and the chap who once had something of a halo about the very mention of his name, had very few fans left in the country. At which she looked nonplussed.
Reminded me of a poet who had been one of my heroes in a past life. I never cared much for his pedestrian prose, but his poetry had once connected to me like nothing else had. Through the influence of my Professors and classmates, I had come to see this poetry too for what it was. A few years ago, I used to attend literary festivals across the country just to hear him speak, though I stopped after the third one, having found that his interviews focused more on personal anecdotes rather than literary discussion, besides being tediously repetitive. Recently I was sitting in a pub with friends and someone mentioned that this poet was speaking at a venue a few hundred metres away. It didn’t seem relevant anymore, after being exposed to the work of a hundred other writers, better and greater than him.
It appears that there can be no heroes in the age of the internet.
Burn the Television
“Human beings are difficult,” he goes on. “We’re difficult to ourselves; we’re difficult to each other and we are mysteries to ourselves; we are mysteries to each other … Why is it believed that poetry, prose, painting, music should be less than we are?”
Amit Chaudhuri, Why television writing has become the new home of verbal complexity
A few months ago, I looked up Big Bang theory after a gap over three years and was unpleasantly surprised – The geeks have mutated into sad stereotypes, science references have made way for silly discussions on relationships, Sheldon has lost almost all the quirks which once made him unique and the subject of scholarly articles like this one – https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/07/amit-chaudhuri-praise-difficult-language, Raj is made to link up with an older charwoman(!) and the humour completely lost in the transition from a well-written sitcom to an average soap. Reminded me of one of the best lines ever written in a self-help book – ‘Burn the Television’.
Fiction as a mirror
Pure fiction (as against formulaic genre writing) is a many-dimensional mirror. In its quest to reveal some aspect of the truth, it also gives glimpses into the writer’s worldview and ideology, their backgrounds, writerly influences, their vision and sometimes into their very soul. As fragile as they are, writers are also brave enough to share their work which reflects them to a great extent. A poet friend once told me many years ago, that she was apprehensive of sharing her poems with her family, lest they read her through the lines. In this context, writers like Alexander McCall Smith, RK Narayan and Eva Ibbotson to name just a few come across as not only good writers but good human beings for their work exudes the human values of kindness, hope, a vision of human nature as being the same everywhere around the world and a tendency to look for the good in everyone and everything. A radiance of positivity pervades their books, which uplifts the reader.
Sometimes I have wondered if the opposite were true. Is it the negativity within the writers themselves that leads them to portray the bullies, bastards and bitches of literary fiction? One often comes across criticism on Nabokov for his portrayal of Humbert Humbert. But as charming as the prose was and as much as it seduced the reader, Lolita was also a meditation on morality, seen through the distorted lens of an unreliable narrator. Nabokov makes it clear that he has no sympathy for HH, whose remorse leads to an attempt at redemption that is far from achieved. Likewise in the novels of Agatha Christie, which are studies in human character, and all of which converge to the defeat of evil and the prevalence of hope for the conventionally good characters. Selfishness, pride, envy, lust, greed and a host of negative emotions have been explored in several major novels like The Magus, The Secret History and Gone Girl, again to name just a few, but the moral voice of the writer comes through implying that they are aware of their character’s fallibilities and do not condone them. Even Katherine Dunne’s brilliant Geek Love with its dark premise and darker characters was at its core a story about family dynamics and filial love.
I was acquainted with a woman since the past few months who writes dark fiction, stories in which the narrative voice seems to endorse the criminal characters, making heroes out of them. She has grown more and more unlikeable since I first met her at an informal writing group which convenes in a little cafe on the weekends. Her face grows openly dark with displeasure when someone else is commended for their work. She hides her successes from those she considers competitors, fearful lest someone else may get something better than what she has, and is quick to make patronising remarks putting down others, sounding as though she were ill-wishing them. Calculative in every conversation, always trying to judge, assess, hit back when there is no need for animosity. I’m very ambitious, she said to me once with an expression similar to the doll in Child’s Play, that it appeared that she would not hesitate to incite someone to crime if it were to profit her in some way. She reminded me of a schoolmate K who at the age of twelve was deliberately mean and spiteful to those of us who got full marks in everything. But such negativity that people try on spew on others only goes back to the senders, three times over.
In academics as much as in creativity, a competitive spirit will hamper the end result while also stunting the soul. Just as a student’s goal should be to comprehend their lessons and score the maximum marks that can be scored without an unhealthy desire to get ahead of everyone else, every writer should know that all writers walk their own individual paths, at their own pace. The world needs all the good books that it can get, and there is always a way for any writer to self-actualise themselves in whatever way they wish to, without having to compare themselves with others and running imaginary races. As a teacher once mentioned in a theatre workshop, competition vanishes in the face of excellence.
On the Protocols of Queues
I was in the queue at the lunch buffet when the waitress pointed us to the plates placed most inconveniently in the middle. As everyone moved there, the curly haired American lady behind me shoved past casually breaking the queue. She was followed closely by her friend who had been behind her, a fat German woman with a perpetually smug smile plastered on her face who aggressively cut ahead of me in the queue to grab a plate, in an almost reptilian reflex action. I debated quietly whether to point out that they were breaking the queue, and then did what the head Professor would have done – ignored it. Even though it made the difference of a fraction of a second, the incivility was irking and out of place in the setting. And then it struck me that I had never ever seen an English person break a queue. Orderly queues are one of the things that I admire about the English.
On the banks of the Cherwell
At the Cherwell boathouse, I sat on a rough bench facing the river and stared into the green waters. It was a fifteen-minute walk from my college room, a very pleasant walk through a treelined path with the boughs overhead making a wide canopy through which the sunlight fell in cool green beams on the ground. It reminded me of one of my favourite places in literature, the world between worlds in The Chronicles of Narnia, which, as we all know, is one of the most beautiful metaphors for a library.
I had booked a punt through the college site, and then cancelled it at the last minute. One look at the boats and I was glad that I had cancelled it. I would have looked like a fool trying to handle the punt by myself. But I felt a deep sense of peace sitting there watching the ducks float past. The summer crowds, mostly students and locals from their appearance were a jolly lot, floating across the river in laughing groups, the little boats swaying. The background sounds blended into the silence and I sat there in peace, contemplating the last two years and the darkness that had threatened to seep again into my mind in the spring, among other things.
I remember someone’s quote that happiness was a library and a garden. Which is true. But to sit by the banks of a river in silence gives something more valuable than happiness – tranquility. Watching the placid green waters of the Cherwell (which the college warns is infested with water-rats, among other things), I felt an immense sense of peace.
A Student’s Prayer
May God protect us both (My Preceptor and me)
May God nourish us both
May we work together uniting our strength for the good of humanity
May our studies be luminous and purposeful
May there be no animosity between us
May there be peace (in the divine), peace (in the environment), peace (within the self)
From the Taittiriya Upanishad.
I think of my Gurus – Mentors, Professors and Teachers who have influenced me, with immense gratitude and respect, when I chant these lines every morning.
The Darkness that comes with Spring
I have always loved the spring, and not only because of the usual things that everyone associates with the season. In Chennai, we don’t even have proper spring. The weather is sweltering hot all the year. One can just about make out the pleasant nip in the early morning air change into a warm current as the months move from Jan-Feb into March, and suddenly the summer takes over the city with its blazing warmth. But I used to watch out for the flowers – the golden Indian laburnum, the pale pink powder-puff flowers and my beloved flame of the forest that would cover the city in orange and gold well until July, sometimes even August. Spring to me was special because it heralded the long vacations that started in April, and my birthday. Once upon a time, spring was my favourite season, because it held the promise of everything.
That was before the darkness seeped into my mind. During the years in which I was seriously depressed, I hardly cared about the season – I cared for nothing except leaving the hellhole that was Trivandrum. I don’t look back at those days but when I hear that city mentioned, I just feel immense gratitude that I don’t belong to that place, that I didn’t grow up there and that I would never have to live there again. Because should such a condition were to ever arise, I would die, literally than live in that sick place.
But now, even when I have a tiny place in Chennai that I can call home, I am not immune to the darkness. I realised it this spring – as the flowers commenced to bloom all around the gardens and squares that I pass on the way to the office, I felt my mind wilting until it finally shrunk into itself, and closed out. That cold sorrow which is not born from any particular grief filled me and I began to weep through the evenings. I was in denial for weeks. I had survived depression once, even written a novel about surviving depression – about which I get odd emails every now and then from people who say that it has given them hope. How could I get depressed again? I tried some of the newly sprung portals like your dost which counsel people on mental health issues and found that they were too cold, corporates set up to harvest profits from the many banes of the present age. Finally after crying loudly and uncontrollably from eight in the night to two thirty in the morning, I logged into my University’s nightline help service, and found solace, a kind of peace, which was followed by a few weeks of intense reading of fiction, some old favourites (Nabokov, Spark and Barnes), some authors for the first time (Coover, Barthelme, Barth – where had they been all my life?) and the darkness slowly receded. Perhaps it was also because the spring was gone by then.
Once upon a time, I loved spring like everyone else. Now every year as the season seems to descend upon the earth like blight, I begin to see why Virginia Woolf took her life in springtime.
The Sounds of Language
On a recent flight, I was alarmed at first when I saw that my seat was next to a lady with a few months old baby. I have nothing against babies in social situations, as long as they are at a safe distance of at least a hundred metres away from me. The prospect of spending eleven hours in the close proximity of one was daunting. However the mother was a sweet lady who kept the baby fed, warm and entertained with great efficiency throughout the flight, and so charmingly apologetic when the kid tried to grab my blanket, glasses and book, that I did not mind the least when the little human tried the above antics or held on to my shoulder with a hot, grubby paw as it slept.
The plane soared silently through the skies, the baby clung to its mother and I clung to the collected plays of Ibsen, each of us cocooned in our own worlds.
What stood out in this mundane encounter was the fact that the lady played Tamil rhymes to the baby whenever he showed signs of getting cranky. His cries immediately toned down to a soft whimper on hearing the sounds, while his mother sang softly along, cooing to him in Tamil.
The sounds of the language brought with it to me, the forgotten warmth of long conversations in colloquial Tamil and casual Hindi with friends and family, the correspondence with most of whom has now been reduced to standard paragraph long Facebook messages on festivals and birthdays. I thought of cousins from Chennai who had acquired funny Tamil accents after a few years abroad, of friends who had studied Tamil as a second language with me and now chose to sign off their emails in French and German and Spanish, a Tamil Professor who told me with great pride that her grandson did not care to speak the language for he dreamed in English. Language is so much more than a medium for communication, it holds within its intonations, slang, idioms and dialects, so many personal associations of time and space and memory specific to each speaker. Perhaps all these people had their individual reasons to choose to distance themselves from certain languages, and make new memories with others.
Watching that homely baby with large intelligent eyes focused on his mother’s smartphone, it warmed the cockles of my heart to think that thanks to his excellent mother, one more child would grow up multi-lingual and perhaps one day, grow to admire Kamban and Bharati as much as he would Keats and Shelley.
