Hoary Rumination

Confession

2010-10-17T15:16:00.006+05:30

It had been a while since I had read, seen or heard something entirely disconnected from me, that had moved me. I have often found myself translating images and passages, other people's experiences, into those that I can relate to; and if they happened to be something that I could find no axis to, either emotionally or ideologically, I found myself masterfully 'projecting' sympathy.

This is the same me who in the spurt of adolescence, had spoken up in an inane moral science class proselytizing on the importance of sympathy, saying that it simply wasn't good enough; that if we could not be empathetic we had no business showing sympathy. (The teacher had simply heard me out, thanked me when I had finished and gone on with her rant as if there had been no interruption!)

This is also the same spoiled child in me who had taken to, very early on in life, making much of her exertions and expecting all attention to be centered upon her. Much as I had wanted to wring a certain woman's neck for implying that I have an attention seeking disorder (resolute in my belief then, that she is branding me without trying to understand my peculiar case{!}) , it has taken me over two years to realize the various different implications of the term 'histrionics'.

Therefore, the present me, a queer mix of self righteousness and what I am beginning to call an unselfconscious (though, not unconscious) self-centered-ness was, no wonder, rendered incapable of responding to things that could not be prototyped into the categories of her limited emotional and ideological archive. This had, I confess, not bothered me for a long time. (I do, after all, live in times which had been advocated by certain twentieth century writers in their treatise called "The Virtue of Selfishness".)

This had become a way of life until it was put to shame by the brutal honesty of a child. It was through his worldview that I could see how much bitterness had clogged my receptivity and how for some time now I have been putting things into predetermined brackets, brackets that I have fought for and have bruised myself in the pursuit of, brackets that are different from those that I had been fighting against and yet for all practical purposes that function like the ones that I have relinquished.

There seems to be something more earnest about existentialism when compared to this form of being which believes that in embracing bitterness and hence legitimizing selfishness, lies it's answers. Atleast existentialism was an acknowledgment of defeat and hence discomfort at the inability to expand one's reach; Individualism functions by convincing people that there is nothing to expand to, that being self centered translates into self sufficiency and hence strength.

However, what seems to be closer to the mark in answering questions about life in the world are those efforts that are not directed towards doing just that. Be it the child who told me the 'story of his life' or the book that finally made me cry, not in the parts where I could see myself but in the parts that I truly felt the character's feelings, were both more life-affirming than any philosophical effort to understand the 'essence of our condition' has been!

There was a time when a certain taciturn, self-absorbed architect created by an immigrant American woman writer used to be my hero; the idea of a self motivated, creative man working against the tide of society was extraordinarily appealing to a misunderstood, self absorbed teenage girl. However, today, the character of a lawyer, motivated by the trials of a girl whom he had known as a teenage boy has forever dislodged the pedestal that had been instated in favour of the former. I no longer see any value in not being able to affect and be affected by people, rather I see it as an insidious ailment and the project to rationalize it, an unpardonable crime against humanity.

[There is no comparison between the writing skills of the two authors. The above mentioned woman was highly skilled and she received her due acclaim as a writer. The second writer, a certain Richard Paul Evans, is more 'popular' with no reason to be remembered in terms of his contribution to Literature, but for some very fortunate emotive skills, he will be remembered by readers like me.]

On His Blindness

2010-07-31T19:03:00.001+05:30

There is so much you never saw..
Your blindness made them stark to me.
There is so much I wished you had seen,
If only to bear witness to what had been.
I held on fast to them...
While you let them drift past.
Your seive of perception has served you well,
You will never know them till the last.

And I will not show them to you.

I am afraid they shall cease to exist,
As soon as you turn to face it.
So, the plan was to cry "Prejudist!"
While being a bit of a hypocrite.
But, you old man, had your own plans..

How can I resent your blindness to me,
When blind is all you will ever be?

Prosecution

2009-07-28T15:41:00.002+05:30

Suspect- (Muddy waters)-
I watched as a dirty brown colour flowed into the sink when I put my hands under the flowing tap. The pristine white sink; its true purpose is to make all dirt stand out in contrast- the dirt on my hands, the dirt in me.
Arrest- My jaw struggles to fit change and I struggle to bring about change-in me, in my life.

Defense- Never been so speechless. I know where I am headed, but I can’t tell you yet. STOP SHOUTING! That’s not going to help me find a name for it!
My poetry has left me, the ability to name things has left me- I don’t own anything any more. I’ve lost the art of definition.
I will find a name someday…(how will that help me be-come? Let’s focus on the being, we’ll see about the owning!) AHA! *flourish*

My Confession- Mine- the possessive pronoun-
This moment is mine. I call it trepidation.
This pain is mine. I call it change.
This page is mine. I call it immortality.
These are their appreciated values-errors, transition and endlessness respectively.

Condemned-This is my life.

The last wish- This is how I want them willed-

The moment I bequeath to my father; for many a moments shall we yearn until eternity- United at last, in our yearnings.

The pain I bequeath to my mother; with the hope that when her stock is compounded by mine, she will find an escape route.

The page I bequeath to my brother; to him I wish delivered my most prized possession-The patient friend who waits to be confided in; the penseive striving to preserve a bit of you forever- to him I wish all that I have wished for myself.

*case closed*

Post Script- " These memories are all we have. Without these, we are blind. Without these we leave the fate of our people to chance." -Albus Dumbledore, Harry Potter and the half blood prince.

Resignation

2008-11-05T20:27:00.000+05:30

Lock me up and throw away the key
Brandishing my claim to insanity
Banging on door to door
Scars; dozens to the score
To have another dream shattered
Shining shards that once mattered
To be forsaken by one’s own identity
To build it again, only fragmentary
Lock me up and throw away the key
Set me free of my misery.

Aspirations

2008-09-23T19:38:00.002+05:30

My eyes ache

For the sight unseen

For that which is etched

In my lids

As gilded dreams.

Thoughts after 13th September

2008-09-23T17:01:00.002+05:30

To say I am apolitical, is to say that I let others (in power) decide the politics of my life. The choice is not between being political and not, it is not between Bhartiya Janta Party and Congress or even Left and Right; it is between having the right choose and forfeiting it to others. I could either sit back and become a victim, or I could volunteer and make a difference. Whether it is inflation or terrorism, bad roads or red tapism, big or small; if it happens to us, we must have a say in it; we must have the right to question it, we must have the right to make it stop.
I don't know how to attain this. I have no grand plans of spearheading a revolution. I just know, as it is common sense to know, that we have a choice in everything that happens to us and if at some point we feel deprived of that choice, it is because someone has usurped it. We can either claim what is rightfully ours, or send our prayers to an unwitting God that the one in power be merciful.

Such is Life

2008-08-07T12:58:00.004+05:30

I was reading some random blogs today and I happen to chance upon one in particular which I could relate to. The blogger laments that when he is not at his desktop he thinks of so many things that he would like to blog about but when he finally sits to do so, he goes blank. It couldn't be more true for me!
Once you get into the blogging grove, you think of so many things that you might have to say to the world, so many sketchy thoughts which you think you wil explore better as you write about them and share with others. But when it comes to the actual act, one seems to be at a loss of inspiration.
This is not to say that the world around me lacks any inspiration. I am constantly being bombarded by various stimuli which gets my head buzzing like the knob of a steaming pressure cooker. Perhaps if I had attempted to express them that instant, they would've held their prominance. However, as time passes and I keep defering the act of writing it out, the thoughts like the steam, fizzles off.
To state a few instances, the consecutive terror attacks in Bangalore and Ahmedabad left most people in the country beddazzled. Metro Now had a special four page coverage of the after effects of the grotesque incident. I remember I was teary eyed at my breakfast table while I read about a 9 year old boy and his 7 year old sister who, beside being physically wounded, will also carry deeply engroved mental scars from the incident. Both the children have been rendered mute by the shock and horror of what had happened. What could I possibly "say" about this? NO words are strong enough to express what I felt at that moment.
However, as time passed and people moved on, this piece of news which had shocked me out of sleep-ridden mental state, became a piece of information, a statistical data, only to be computed. Does anyone care? Momentarily, perhaps. First, sheer shock and then anger riddled with an element of fear- what if it is one of our own next? But as we get back into the daily grind, these feelings sediment within the depths of our mind and life's guiles help to filter out the residual effects with time; and ofcourse, I am no exception to the phenomena.
It seems we have been exposed to so much brutality, blood and murder that these sights fail to move us further than a certain point. We are a generation of desensitised, self-centered individuals. Infact, as Amartya Sen points out in his book Violence and Identity, in India, most people consider violence the means with which to etch out the parameters of their being. Afterall, the nation that we are talking of , was born in a post-modern world, of a very difficult labour. India had to calim for itself an existance that it had been denied. It had to battle for it's right to persist, thrash in violent attempts to breathe, hurt itself in the process and yet remarkably ascertain an identity for itself through bloodshed.
Our civilisation is like one of those timeless fortresses, which uphold their scars and battered structures as the essence of their being. The lives that reside within such monuments-plants, birds, rodents and reptiles, turn indifferent to the surroundings as long as they are able to sustain themselves. People who live in this country are no different.
The heights of insensitivity was probably manifested in a group of people, who either in order to settle personal scores with high officials, or simply to gather some sort of demented, sick amusement, made false proclaimations of more blasts. I fail to understand these people. Do they even understand what it is to have lives wiped off in a blink? For God sake, these are real lives that we are talking about, not some virtual strategy game!
As I read these news articles day after day, there were a myraid of questions battling in my mind. Why are they doing this? What do they want? Can't there be any other way of settling this? WHY? My mind was screaming for some sort of logic, some rationale so as to be able to make something of the world around me, to be able to salvage the sanctity of human sanity.

Believe it or not, the first hint to an answer came to me through some movies that I've recently seen-

Alfred to Batman: I don't think you understand this man. He needs no motive, it is not money or power that he is after. " Some people just like to stand back and watch the world burn." -The Dark Knight

"The first rule of mission havoc is you do not ask any questions." -Fight Club.

Do I need to spell out the answer or does the chill running down your spine tell you all that you need to know?

There was another, more recent report in Metro Now that caught my attention one morning. It read- "Auto driver kills man for 2 rupees." The auto driver who had demanded Rs.12 from his passenger had been so ticked off when he was haggled with, that he brought out an iron rod and struck the man on his head and then drove his vehicle over the body rpeatedly, until he was assured that he was dead.
Along with this incident, there were a few more similar instances- one of a man killing his friend when he refused to buy him alcohol, another of a man stabbing his milkman when he refused to give him some extra milk for the day and so on. This article was followed by a by-line which stated that Intermittent Explosive Disorder is different from merely being short tempered. When a person is suspected of suffering from exceptional temper issues, he must be treated immediately or else he may prove to be dangerous, both for those around him as well as himself.
I was left wondering how I would recognise an extraordinary temper outburst from an ordinary one. Afterall, there are so many people around me, friends and family, who sometimes overreact to the point that they break things around them or try to hurt either themselves or the person infront despite the fact that they do not have enough reason to unleash so much violence. Some of the most logical people I know sometimes blow their top to the extent that they end up doing or saying things that they later regret. I can remember instances, only too well, when I had to struggle hard to keep myself from physically lashing out. How much is too much???

It would perhaps be an exaggeration to say that most of us our susceptible to some sort of explosive disorder, but I don't consider myself off the mark when I say that we are an insecure lot of people, who traverse the brink of insanity by living in this world each day.

In the words of the Joker, from The Dark Knight, " Madness is like gravity, all it needs is a slight push."

Terrorism is undoubtedly born of socio-political factors, but it contains a certain madness which I suspect lurks even in the best of us. After a point, the motives, whatever they maybe, recede to make way for an illogical thirst for blood. The only way to not give into it is to keep a tight reign over one's sense of logic. But what use is logic, when everything around you is disintegrating into inexplicable, but perceptibly real debris?

Even though such thoughts take their hold over me at times, it's not too long before I wipe off my clammy hands and put them to some use. As one of my close friends said, "what is the use of thinking about it when you aren't being able to do anything?"
So, I put my mind to 'better' use and think about those inane things that need my attention and thrust these ruminations back into some security vault of my mind.
I read the news, fold the paper and go on with my day. I try not to look too closely at the group of people with their banners proclaiming hunger strike around Jantar Mantar, as I make my way towards Janpath to meet a friend for lunch.
We meet up and congratulate each other on having made it to premier educational institues of the country. We are confident. We know shall inherit this world. We the harbingers of logic and sanity shall stand over the ruins of the world and place our seal of ownership over it. Why then, am I not satisfied?

A Midsummer Night Dream

2008-05-12T19:04:00.000+05:30

Birds that seed prisms on their tails..
And roost on the lofty chambers of divide;
Scared to a flutter
By a girl's pitter patter
Flies off in an arc...

For a moment there is a rainbow..
A blinding stream of light
Lucid when the eyes are closed
But opened only to Darkness.

Insanity

2008-04-25T01:14:00.000+05:30

"Behind mock-ceremony of your grief
Lurked the burlesque instinct of the ham;
You never altered your amused belief
That life was a mere monumental sham. "

What is the brink of insanity?
To not know yourself,
Or to overstep humanity?
To be bitten,
To lock it within.
Writhing in pain,
In humiliation.
Time and honor?
Illusions of civilization.
Reality..
Creating, disrupting,
Deluding vision.
Aching in happiness,
Booming in sorrow;
Fading hint,
Of a labeling morrow.
Stillness leading to motion,
No need of any volition.
The lines all blurry,
Images all scurry,
Fallen in an eddy,
That takes you within;
Then all is even.
The world looks into your face
Instead of you facing it,
They call you insane;
But they’re the ones losing it.

my existantial crisis

2008-04-04T23:15:00.000+05:30

this is an attempt to seize my whirling world of perceptions again, to be able to comment on the experience, if not control it. it has been a year since i last wrote, not just on this blog, but anywhere. as a result i have been suffering an anguish, the thought of expressing which leaves me exhausted. my writings used to contain a certain vigour and perhaps, a certain vanity, which was it's halmark. that 'energy' seems to be sucked out of me and the very thought of writing, which invariably entails invoking thoughts and emotions leave me weary. that vanity, that sense of being in control when i write seems to be lightyears away from me now and i am left with shivering fingers trying to compute wavering thoughts into words.

it is asthough i have exhausted my ability to feel and have rendered myself numb, except during the painful sporadic fits. it started with a tingling sensation, which was not too difficult to ignore intially, but eventually took over my body and mind and left me gaping at the pace of my life. i did and said things as if i were an automaton. there were brief spells of recognition which passed by me even before i could grasp the shock of where i was; or should i say- what i was.

it is with a lot of courage that i have used the past tense because i know that i still run the risk of meeting myself at the turning of some dark alley and being shocked at the prospect of what i am. i have been grovelling, for as long as i can remember, for a mirror that reflects the various dimentions that i exist within, so as to decrease the shock-value at various junctures. when i tried to turn my gaze upon myself, it was words that helped me do so. without their aid i feel lost! not to mention completely vulnerable to the feeble perceptions that world around holds up to me. however, it is now time that i muster up every iota of strength in myslef and take charge.

those who know me will be able to relate this trait of mine to the state of my room. it is usually in a catastrophic condition, resembling an area affected by a violent tornado (there is method in the madness, i always vehemently proclaim!) until it reaches a point where i can't take it anymore and then it magically transforms into an excusitely and accurately pruned and groomed garden. however, the precision soon begins to suffocate me and the order eventually disintegartes into the cherished 'salmagundi'.

even though the struggle seems to be an existantialist one, where the action, atleast at first, appears to be futile, i cannot disregard the momentary satisfaction that i derive from a job well done. i have proclaimed often enough (and quoted simone de bouvoire to back myself up) that i hate housework because there is simply no end to it! the furniture that you dust today shall gather frustrating amounts of dust the very next day, the clothes you so painstakingly wash will be soiled sooner or later, the dishes that you wash with a sense of achievement will be greased yet again! how is it any less than sisyphus pushing his boulder up the hill? despite my victorious argument, i find myself succumbing to these petty basics urged by own needs and habit and as reward, i have a fleeting moment's satisfaction.

as i try to clamber my way out of the pits that i have found myself over the last year, my epiphanic realisation has been that the greatest folly of human intelligence is the hope to perpetuate an experience. as the corny old proverb goes, " nothing is permanent except change". however, the theory of change itself, entails within it, the theory of regeneration and as certain optimists would say, the theory of evolution.

what comes to my mind now, is the words of an aquaintance who said we don't go round in circles but infact we follow a spiral trajectory, moving up another level each time we reach where we started. even as i quote her, i wonder if the differences in levels are not merely imaginary constructs, in order to give a sense of purpose to the otherwise inane human existance. perhaps there is a difference, perhaps sisyphus devices new methods and covers the length of the hill in a shorter span of time and therefore relishes a moment of exulatation in "achievement" before he is thrown back to the starting point. perhaps the starting point is not always the same point, perhaps it is moving upwards and the distance covered is impercptibly diminishing; yet there is no hope for sisyphus' salvation, is there?

even camus who made a case for sisyphus' happiness was not bold enough to grant him redemption. what i retain most from his enchanting worldview potrayed through the myth of sisyphus are the last few words of the tract - " one must imagine sisyphus happy."
there are two words that strike me significant in this statement- must and imagine. the cynic in me cannot help but point out the desperate need for positivity as implied in the word "must" and the incredulous nature of human emotions that need to be catalyzed by their strongest weapon against all that is unfair in the world- their imagination.

so, here i am, in response to the imperative of camus' "must"and am subsequently struggling to find relevance in shelley and keats so as to be able to reinstate my rusted motor of imagaination. if in the process i begin to grow tedious, i beg my readers to be patient; i must imagine my dear bought Ithaca round the corner... i must wait for the evanescent godot to appear before me any moment now...

bereaved

2007-04-04T01:58:00.000+05:30

it is now empty
where your talisman i wore
you've sailed away from me
i search you still on shore.
it is so vivid in my mind
that day you passed away
watching the stars shine
my feelings to betray.
betrayal!
that is what i felt.
to fly away and leave all behind
life's togetherness undermined..
it seemed to me an easy recourse
in steeped the feelings of remorse
turn back time and make it stop!
i pray to the inanimate laptop.
come back and hear me out!
the hoary walls hear me shout.
how could you leave, it's so unfair!
the mouse squeaks in it's lair.
i seethe at the insensitivity of time
inevitability be deemed a crime!
in death you have excluded me
that is my grievance against thee.
come now and defend your case!
i look up and see my own face.

words

2007-04-03T02:32:00.000+05:30

The one thing that I most distrust, is something that I cannot do without.

It is an extreme case of dependency from which there is no escape. It is an existantialist crisis wherein ignorance probably would have been bliss. Knowledge of the fact that you are being betrayed is inconsequential when you know your dependence on it is, in anyway, an imperative. For instance, you know the air you breathe is polluted ( atleast if you live in Delhi, you undoubtedly know so) but you cannot very well give up breathing for it! Neither is it feasible for you to give up your established life and source of livelihood to move off to a place which is less polluted. You know you are slow poisoning yourself but you really cannot do anything about it. Exasperating, isn't it?

That is the relationship I share with words. I distrust them highly because they are the most relative things on earth; (Hell, one word could be interpreted in a million ways! ) and yet I cannot seem to do without them! Language, seems to me, an extremely crude method of expression and yet I resort to language itself to express how crude it is!

Nature seems to abound in more profound ways of expression and yet, we, too inadequate to transmute to any other way, embrace language articulation as our only way.

Eve, in Milton's Paradise Lost says, "Language of man pronounced by tongue of brute and human sense expressed? The first atleast of these I thought denied To beasts, who God on their creation day Created mute to all articulate sound; The latter I demur, for in their looks Much reason, and in their actions oft appear." She later learns that the gift of language had been bestowed upon the brute by consumption of the forbidden fruit. Shouldn't it therefore have followed ( in an evolutionist teleology, not a creationist predetermination), that humans who were already endowed with language, be equipped with something greater, having been made privy to the knowledge of good and bad after consuming the very fruit? Afterall, ( stepping outside the religious parameter), good and bad being relative concepts, would require a more profound method to elucidate their meaning. However man remains oblivious to any such method and thus struggles eternally to bridge the gap between subjective experience and it's representation in words. The Gospel of Matthew in the New Testament, in section XII, verse 37, says, "For by your words you will be justified and by your words you will be condemned." It is refering to one's judgement day in heaven, but even if it is not god who is judging us, what we speak is often rather decisive in our social relationships. It is no wonder that the Greeks paid so much attention to rhetoric!

However assuming rhetoric to be an application of one's understanding of semantics, with 'a finite meaning inherent in a lexical unit that can be composed to generate meanings for larger chunks of discourse', is unacceptable to me for the sheer reason that it is in variance with what I perceive. Truth- conditional semantics, seems to me, an oversimplified way of studying linguistics. I would suggest that the Sapir-Whorf Hypotheses and Cognitive Linguistics are closer to mark when it comes to understanding communication because they acknowledge individual experiences and the environment of language users.

Richard Bach in his book 'One' speaks of parallel lives stemming from alternate perception. He says each person must attain his own enlightment, for as soon as one tries to enunciate one's knowledge, it becomes open to interpretation and mutates to subjective perception. Moreover, even a person's own 'enlightment' is mutating with time and experience. Therefore, perception is not just subjective but also transitory; and to encompass that in words, itself is a difficult task. Further, the folly of language lies in the fact that the listner will interpret those words entirely according to his own perception, even if the speaker is talented enough to restrict the arena of interpretation by careful choice of words.

It is as if different individuals were inhabitants of different orbs of existance and to communicate with others on their seperate orbs, they send words as flighty messengers. These messengers, even when sent to the same orb, are recieved through different portals at different times and therefore shed or gain relevance with each variant.

Verbosity often results in the loss of meaning and brevity is not my strongest point. Thus to elucidate my meaning, i quote George Eliot-
"Our words have wings, but fly not where we would."

Could there atleast be a tracing device so as to know where they flew off?

On "Growing Up"

2007-03-29T18:52:00.000+05:30

I have always wanted to race with time and fastforward the process of growing up. Infact, i do not remember much from the age of 11 or 12 because most of it was spent speculating what it would be like to be 16, 18 or 20. Now, at twenty, when I hear my friends talking about their childhood, i sometimes feel like i have missed out on something. On the other hand, each person's life is his or her own unique story and mine was meant to be written this way.

One of the reasons for this enormous desire to "grow up", I recognise now, was to have my parents take me seriously. I would feign unnatural maturity and courage, all for the sole purpose of gaining an entry into that forbidden realm that my parents seemed to shut me out of on the grounds that i wouldn't understand. Not that my parents didn't give me love or attention. Infact, for most parts of my childhood, i was a spoilt little brat who got what she wanted even before she could ask for it. But what i wanted was somewhat different.

I suppose I was a child who didn't want to be treated as a child. I wished my parents would confide more important things to me and entrust me with responsibilities. Whenever i tried to help out with household chores, i was rebuked and sent off to play. When I tried to ask my mother why she was upset, she would tell me i wouldn't understand such things. It was perhaps a sheer sense of helplesness that governed childhood that made me anxious for adulthood.

A particularly observant adult had once come up to me and said that adults are just as helpless as kids. It's just that they have perfected the art of pretending that they are in control. I was embarassed at being discovered and looked at him as if i didn't know what he was talking about, quickly moving away to hide my blush.

Now, standing at the threshold of that much coveted domain, i recoil and wonder whether i really want to cross over. Adults teach children, almost on a default mechanism, that one must never lie. However, most of adulthood is premised on selective focus, hazing out the parts that don't feature in one's scheme of well-being. For instance, patriarchy is men's justification to overlook what they do to women, and the bourgoise coins up terms like 'Social Darwinism' to absolve themself of any social responsibility towards the proletariat. A common strain between all of these is that they essentialise certain norms on which they base their tautology. ( Notice how conveniently i have excluded myself by using the third-person pronoun!)

The major difference between an adult and a child, from where i stand, is that a child asks questions and an adult simply learns to overlook things knowing that if all questions were to be answered, a whole established system of norms would be turned on it's head. Perhaps that is why most revolutionaries are young and most status-quoists acrrue a certain seniority, both in terms of age as well as in terms of rank. However, we come across many revolutionists, disillusioned from their cause and dejected into poetry as time passes. Adulthood seems to be synonymous with a certain acceptance of things as they are. It's a bleak picture to see the avant-garde conform to the precursor of social acceptance viz. lying to oneself.

Perhaps fighting the tide seems easier to me now, than it will to a future self. If i were to the read this very post years from now, would i smile off my infantile whims, or sigh with a sense despondency and quickly turn away from it? Or would I read it with a sense of accomplishment at having managed the difficult feat of keeping the child alive in me?

At this juncture I am reminded of the story of my grandmother and me ( I call it 'the story', because i have no recollection of it, only repeted recountals from various relatives. ) It all began ( for me) when i asked my mother the reason behind my extraordinary term of addressal for my maternal grandma: the vernacular word 'danda' which translates to a stick or a rod. She explained to me that when i used to be tiny, i asked a lot of questions and it so happened that one day when i was out in the gardens with my grandma, i had exhausted her with innumerable "what is that?" and "why is it like that?". So when i turned to her with a bewildered look at having seen the bamboo stilts being used at a nearby house under renovation, she said what roughly translates into, "That's a danda; and if you don't stop asking questions, thats what i am going hit you with!" For some reason the animated gestures with which she said so, struck me as funny and i burst into a fit of giggles. Then on, until the day she breathed her last and for that matter, even now, she has been my 'danda'! Perhaps, it is even apt, for I never stopped asking questions for as long as she was with me.

This very danda of mine, wizened with age, was to say to an older me, " don't ask so many questions. A person who questions so much, is never happy in life."

Uptil now i have not conformed to this axiomatic advise of her's. I know it was given with the best of intentions and with a sense of tender protectiveness that I defied so often when she was alive and miss so dearly in her absence.

It would be presumptious of me to say there is no truth in the statement of the lady who had witnessed the better part of four generations in her lifetime. However, at this juncture, when i am about to step over into the world of adults with an unsure, trembling foot and with no danda to pick me up and sail me over, the way she did with all other thresholds when i was a child, i pose a definitive question (yet again!) : what is adulthood?

Is it a disillusioned acceptance of the state of things ? Or does it entail a sense of responsible self-reliance, wherein you make your own choices and bear their consequences entirely by yourself?

On one hand, when you conform to societal norms to be accepted into the realm of adulthood, what you are giving up is the child in you who urges you to ask questions and know 'why?' In other words you are belittling the importance of asking questions. If you do this, you find ratification from the majority and sense of secure well-being. It is not that if you take this path, you will not face strife and pain. But what will happen is, that you will notice that most people are party to that same strife and will derive your solace from that.

On the other hand, if you go the other way, you are dismissing the idea that adulthood has anything to do with conformity at all. What you are then asserting is that the act of asking questions maybe child's play, but to be able to actually answer them encompasses true adulthood. In this case, you would probably have to undergo more strife than the first case, but you would be better adept at dealing with this strife because you would know the cause of it, instead of trying to fight off a ghost that you are not allowed to name.

Again, i really can't say whether these are youthful theories or whether they shall stand the test of time. All I know is that if adulthood reequires me to give up asking questions, I am going to be in denial for a looooong time to come. On the other hand, if it means i get to hunt up the answers to my own questions, I sure am 'game'!

echoes

2007-03-28T13:34:00.001+05:30

The blogging world is much like the black hole of cyber space. The anomalous ideas that it sucks in from all parts of the world, adds up to the matter of it's behemoth gravitational center. It is also true that it deludes those who view it from outside; one must be a part of it to truly know it's nature. Thus, here I am, sending my abstract musings into it's center in the form of echoes that fill up it's empty abyss.

Echoes, because ideas always have precedents, originating from some level of the unconscious (whether collective or personal); echoes, because they are mere reflections. Even though they are perceptible, their very existance is suspect. Thus, they endlessly fill the abyss and yet when we see it, it continues to remain empty.

The world is too huge to fit within the lens of the camera. Thus we choose a point of focus and in a Single Lens Resolution camera, which undoubtedly gives the best quality pictures, the surroundings blur out. That doesn't however mean that the rest of the world does not exist. Human perception, like cameras are handicapped with limited resolution. They fail to encompass all at once. One of my favourite urdu couplets by Mirza Galib reads, if we cannot see the ocean in a drop of water and the whole in a particle, man's vision is but a child's plaything.

Plato said that humans are capable of only having Opinions on the Idos of things, taking for granted ofcourse, that the Idos remains constant. However, being of a cynical, materialist worldview, I automatically write off the Idos as mutable; and then, all we are left with is an Opinion of an Idos that once was. Hence only a fleeting reflection that soon dissolves and leaves us to painstakingly build our Opinions again.

My view would infact render man's vision a child's plaything, for indeed, even when we come close to viewing the ocean in a drop of water, the drop has already evaporated and we are left wondering if the ocean was but a figment of our imagination.

poised gape of hollow portals

2007-03-28T13:19:00.000+05:30

Breaking frail ingenuity
Calling on liberty
Stashed away in shame
Squashed flame
Of a smoked out butt
Damning the rheum flood.

Echoes fill the empty abyss
Vindicating the word of promise
Reality, a revered reverie
Time, it's corollary.

Piercing shards persist
Even in ignoble demolish.
Look at me and I exist.
Look away and I diminish.
Poised gape of hollow portals,
Perception lights the world of mortals.