don't let emotions cool down

Reading Vaikom Mohammed Basheer’s Collected Works. Came across this quote in the introduction, Basheer telling someone to write down in the heat of the emotion, but don’t publish:- “In this occasion, while your heart is full of happiness, you write stories and poems too. Don’t waste such occasions. Don’t let emotions cool down. Before that, put it on paper. Remember that always.. Don’t be in a hurry to send the stories for publishing. Write down, a lot. There is time. Just don’t waste the occasions to write”. Basheer is known to polish his writing so much that original writing to publishing might take years and the material shrinks considerably by then. What would be his reaction to this age when everyone is publishing their thought streams – to blogs, social media, emails. There is less rewrite, less editing.

In college, I read mostly pulp fiction. Gorged on the “thrillers”, any kind. It was an easy way to kill time. But last week, when I was in a used book exhibition in office, didn’t feel like picking up any of them – maybe I am growing up finally. I used to get chided by a few purists in college about reading pulp fiction compared to Malayalam or literary fiction, the real deal. But the thrillers presented a way to escape reality, live in alternate universes – not troubled by tales of poverty, real emotions and stories that don’t end well most of the times. I had read of lot of Malayalam – but still chose translations (our communist govts meant translations of Russian authors in public library). But maybe it is time to go back to the roots. There is rich fiction in Malayalam, stalwarts who has written enough for generations – even though Malayalis of today maybe mostly expatriates, the stories with the smell of the earth is the thread which can bring back the memories, keep us grounded. Hope to read more. 

spirituality

Xmas is around the corner and end of a long year which I am not sad to get rid of. We were wandering around a Xmas shop this weekend, lot of pretty ornaments to hang on the trees, greens, red and gold. There was a kid running around the boxes of ornaments, calling out to his mother every other second, squealing with delight of discovering so many things, a bundle of energy. I watched him trot around, he had some difficulty in walking, which he was oblivious of.  I had read somewhere that sometime seeing beauty brings you certain tinge of sadness too and it is due to the fact that you realize at the back of your mind that it is not permanent, not everlasting. I was thinking that this kid will grow up one day, the unbounded happiness will get mixed with expectations, pride, competition, jealousy, desire and all the other maladies which eats up the adult world. I distinctly remember the time when I thought none of those matters, all that the adults were talking about are exaggerations, and ours is the last generation which will do away with petty things like caste and corruption etc because we were incorruptible, pure at heart, incapable of harming anyone. It took a long time to grow up.

All these musings were following my latest obsession – J D Salinger and his short stories. I read that he stopped publishing for 30-40 years after getting attracted to Vedanta. It was probably act of renunciation. That he followed Gospel of Ramakrishna and practiced it. It seems he has left Vedantic clues in his last of the stories. And that maybe he didn’t stop writing, just stopped publishing and there would be some new publications coming up, including his notes on Vedanta. I am truly fascinated and puzzled by people getting bowled over completely by belief or faith.

I had a friend in college, someone I met on the first day probably, spent all of the four years with. Brilliant guy, but uninterested in marks and people worrying about exams, scoffed about people trying still to get to IIT, satisfied with life and silent and observing in a corner. But he is the kind of guy who experimented with everything, someone who would pick me up from home on Saturday morning to go to a bar, who asked me to try a piece of chicken because he couldn’t put up with the idea that I could go through life without tasting meat, saying it is not different from cauliflower  – I did taste the chicken and true to his word he never asked again. He is someone I trusted to ride with him even when he is drunk (youth, right?). One time I remarked to another friend that his younger brother is so handsome unlike him, while I was getting behind the bike, he told me that I shouldn’t have said that and it must have hurt this friend – like a vintage photo, I remember the time and the place when he said that and I see the picture of us from that moment burnt into memory. Final year, I flunked the CTS interview and two of my constant companions including him got into it. He quit CTS within an year to get his MS. I got married and one time we visited him in his college in Syracuse. He had become deeply religious and was living with a missionary, in a seminary. He was lost to me. He was aloof and didn’t even call when he was visiting with a congregation near where I lived. He came back to TVM after his MS and started teaching, rather than going after lucrative jobs and settle down in US. Couple of years back, I went to his college for recruitment, primarily to meet him – he told me not to fail his students. After the interviews, when I told him I did reject one of them, he asked me the name and the details of why I thought so. Then told me that times are not the same as when we were studying, there is more drugs in colleges and it is easy for them to go astray.

One more friend from the college turned religious, shaved his head, took up saffron and joined ISCON. On my count, 3 out of 90 from my college batch now. What made them to take the leap towards religion and spirituality? Do they see something that majority of us don’t? I sometimes wonder if it is a mental condition itself – since one other of these friends with whom I playfully took up an argument about faith, tried to prove why I was wrong vehemently and kept trying since then for years to make me see the light. I saw a picture of Ambanis in front of Guruvayoor temple today, directly in front of sreekovil, without having to stand in queue for hours and getting pushed within seconds to keep moving  – these are not like that. They don’t want anything from God, not to protect their wealth, not to ask for favors. They are content in their faith, there is some calmness and peace that has descended on them. Is that what God wants – to create all the material things for the purpose of testing, all of the imperfections to try and overcome. Like what Chekhov wrote, we are emotional beings and we suffer and rejoice and feel – why would we reject all that and become a stoic? Why should that be the only path to reach God? Why did He put us on earth, if the purpose was to find him by renouncing all the earthly things, in this life itself?

Anyway, I decided to read Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna (PDF, 4MB). If I work through all 1100 pages of it, it will be the first time of its kind. I couldn’t suffer through the likes of OSHO, who takes up prime positions in all book festivals in TVM – I thought those are preachy about some secrets for pages upon pages without saying what the secret is. Now I want to see what drove JD Salinger over the edge..

Bananafish and For Esme – Salinger stories

Came across short stories of J D Salinger. Read two stories so far – "For Esme – with Love and Squalor" and "A perfect day for Bananafish". It is part of Nine Stories, so few more of this kept for the weekend, like saving few more servings of a delicious food for later.

These stories had such a strange concoction that I ended up searching for the meaning of it. Why did Seymour Glass shoot himself, what finally prompted him? Why did Sergeant X feel sleepy finally after reading Esme’s letter? Turns out these stories have so much of symbolisms that each are like a crossword puzzle. Distaste towards materialism, failure to communicate, loss of innocence, loneliness – a whole lot of it is said in so few words, each sentence open for interpretation, containing back stories on motivations, philosophies and intentions.

Now that makes the readers think to find out why he said something in that particular manner and different people are reading different meanings to it. Found a very good analysis of Bananafish and a good article about For Esme, but there is so much so that some people have even done research thesis on the language, signs, symbols in these short stories. Finding clues from the sentences beyond the direct meaning is making this way more interesting..

I had read Catcher in the Rye and Franny and Zooey years back, now after this, re-reading them might be a good idea to see how much of the puzzle I can piece together.

Chekhov

I had stayed away from short stories – I felt those don’t treat the people, their lives in enough detail to paint the picture in mind and the endings are also inconclusive. But then read Alice Munro’s stories a few months back which changed the perspective. Recently bookmarked this page to read a short story a day. Came across Anton Chekhov’s story, The Huntsman. Russian authors are more familiar to us Keralites probably due to the communist link, we have a Russsian cultural center in Trivandrum and public library has Malayalam translations of scores of Russian books. I had read quite a few during school and since then. But I never came across Chekhov, maybe since he wrote stories and plays. His ability to paint a portrait of people and their worlds in few sentences is like some charcoal artists making a picture with few quick strokes. People in his stories don’t seem to be perfect, good and bad mixed in them, vain and profound alternatively.  Even though it has been more than 100 years since these stories are written, it doesn’t seem old – it is interesting that while the world has changed unrecognizably in various ways, technological progress, human understanding of the universe, quantum physics and marching towards artificial intelligence, we still are nowhere near understanding ourselves.

Few good quotes. This one from the story, Ward No. 6, a debate on whether being happy is purely internal (a stoic) –

"I only know that God has created me of warm blood and nerves, yes, indeed! If organic tissue is capable of life it must react to every stimulus. And I do! To pain I respond with tears and outcries, to baseness with indignation, to filth with loathing. To my mind, that is just what is called life. The lower the organism, the less sensitive it is, and the more feebly it reacts to stimulus; and the higher it is, the more responsively and vigorously it reacts to reality. How is it you don’t know that? A doctor, and not know such trifles! To despise suffering, to be always contented, and to be surprised at nothing, one must reach this condition" — and Ivan Dmitritch pointed to the peasant who was a mass of fat — "or to harden oneself by suffering to such a point that one loses all sensibility to it — that is, in other words, to cease to live. You must excuse me, I am not a sage or a philosopher," Ivan Dmitritch continued with irritation, "and I don’t understand anything about it. I am not capable of reasoning."

 This from the story, Gustav. Being too honest, saying truth to the faces in every instance and keeping the eyes always open – it is a hard life.

"Yes, I always tell people the truth to their faces. I am not afraid of anyone or anything. There is a vast difference between me and all of you in that respect. You are in darkness, you are blind, crushed; you see nothing and what you do see you don’t understand. . . . You are told the wind breaks loose from its chain, that you are beasts, Petchenyegs, and you believe it; they punch you in the neck, you kiss their hands; some animal in a sable-lined coat robs you and then tips you fifteen kopecks and you: ‘Let me kiss your hand, sir.’ You are pariahs, pitiful people. . . . I am a different sort. My eyes are open, I see it all as clearly as a hawk or an eagle when it floats over the earth, and I understand it all. I am a living protest. I see irresponsible tyranny — I protest. I see cant and hypocrisy — I protest. I see swine triumphant — I protest. And I cannot be suppressed, no Spanish Inquisition can make me hold my tongue. No. . . . Cut out my tongue and I would protest in dumb show; shut me up in a cellar — I will shout from it to be heard half a mile away, or I will starve myself to death that they may have another weight on their black consciences. Kill me and I will haunt them with my ghost. All my acquaintances say to me: ‘You are a most insufferable person, Pavel Ivanitch.’ I am proud of such a reputation. I have served three years in the far East, and I shall be remembered there for a hundred years: I had rows with everyone. My friends write to me from Russia, ‘Don’t come back,’ but here I am going back to spite them . . . yes. . . . That is life as I understand it. That is what one can call life."

writing and reading

(1)

My writing education – http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/my-writing-education-a-timeline?src=longreads.  An inspiring article – on role models, good teachers, goodness in people, hope and persistence. Coming across a role model like this, who is infallible, a perfect human being – that is so rare.

Last week I happened to connect briefly with a blogger whom I was reading for more than 10 years – I was introduced to many interesting books based on his recommendations. One of which is still a hard nut to crack for me (A Thousand Plateaus – Deleuze and Guattari), but it is one of his lifetime favorites. For me it is like drinking green tea for the first time. So I asked him how he came to like it – he said parts of that book hit him like a train. I was fascinated by that – to be moved that much by a book. When I read some parts of this article, it reminded me of that phrase.

What we’re doing in writing is not all that different from what we’ve been doing all our lives, i.e., using our personalities as a way of coping with life. Writing is about charm, about finding and accessing and honing ones’ particular charms.

 Literature is a form of fondness-for-life. It is love for life taking verbal form.

 A story’s positive virtues are not different from the positive virtues of its writer. A story should be honest, direct, loving, restrained. It can, by being worked and reworked, come to have more power than its length should allow. A story can be a compressed bundle of energy, and, in fact, the more it is thoughtfully compressed, the more power it will have.

 Knowing him has helped us grow into better versions of ourselves: more dignified, less selfish. This, of course, is what a ‘role model’ is: someone who, by gracefully embodying positive virtues, causes you to aspire to them yourself.

(2)

I came across the above through http://longreads.com/. When the reading has reduced to sound bites in social media or short articles in newspapers which offer quick dump, long form articles exploring a subject or profile of a person is refreshing. Longreads features most read long form articles around the web every week and many times I come across some gems from there. Another of similar one is #7 Deadly Reads – Sitdown Sunday http://www.thejournal.ie/7-deadly-reads/news/. New Yorker, The Atlantic, Rolling Stones, NYT etc end up being the most featured. The Hindu in India does long form, but many of them are so scholarly that it is hard to digest. Not sure if there are any other good ones in India. ​

disappointed

One of those days where disappointment hits hard

When the clock that usually runs frantically, slows down

Disappointed with futility of lot of endeavors

How we convince ourselves that we are being useful

How we convince others that what we are doing is important

How we are all able to do more, but don’t  

 

Disappointed in leaders who promise hope and bright future

Talk a big game, higher purpose, incomprehensible philosophies

Because that is what they were supposed to do

To move people, bring about change

 

Disappointed to give in naively, believe in new fads

Disappointed in mediocrity, mine and others around

In doing something only until the tension builds

In doing something, only to honor the duty than because I believe

Disappointed in the charades, even when everyone knows

And plays along with it, not being able to change a thing

 

None of this is important, in larger scheme of things

Petty worries, irrelevant expectations, blown up only in mind

Knowing all that, disappointed in not being able to suppress

Knowing life is all these moments, good follows bad, wait out the bad

Though some say all this was part of the learning

Wouldn’t change a thing if we do all of this again

Isn’t regret a valid emotion too?

 

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Can’t write poems and couldn’t read it also, but one of the things I haven’t given up yet. Trying to read these days – subscribed to a poem a day. But this one just came out this way, on the way back from office, putting it out in its just born form. This is more like how we write powerpoint, nothing in full sentences. A slow day. But right before I reached home, RJs in FM was playing a game, asking people to repeat a dialog from a classic movie, on how to make chicken curry. Even though I don’t know about that being a vegetarian (even though I don’t look like one), it kind of reaffirmed why we mallus are always making fun. Of everything, of our politicians, religion and ourselves. Then they were talking about why Kasaragod mallus love more honestly, how Kannur mallus love so truly (irony since they are the most violent when it comes to politics, but maybe because they love so fiercely) compared to us in Trivandrum, who keep people at an arm’s length. All this within a small sliver of land, in a corner of India – happily living away, being all important – brought a smile finally..

life under yellow haze

Looking outside my window, I can see the tall building of Tata Steel. It is on the other side of a 4 line elevated highway, lined with footpath which looks pretty nice with some mosaic pattern. The stretch looks like a Hollywood set with façade buildings, looks unpopulated.

But this is not what I saw for an hour drive through Kolkata. It is my first time here, was curious about Calcutta that I read about so much. Land of Tagore, Satyajit Ray, communism and literate intelligent people. But the drive through the city seemed to me like a horror show, like those Halloween rides in theme parks where you are taken inside through tunnels and suddenly zombie dummies jerk on to your path.

Coming out of the airport, I took the pre-paid taxi – not the AC or private ones, but the one controlled by City Police. Yellow taxies here are all old ambassadors, taxi drivers in tatters. For few minutes after coming out of the airport, I was trying to connect to a conference call – it kept saying all lines are busy, it anyway never got free even after 10 tries, so I left it. City is derelict, decadent, decrepit, decaying, dilapidated – this is the city where all of those words will fit perfectly. Buildings wouldn’t have seen paint in ages and I think everyone decided that something that is broken is better left that way. Just like we as irresponsible bachelors used to live – assuming some mess made is better left untouched, as if it will go away on its own, ignoring it or assuming it is not there and carefully sidestepping it every time. Even the trees by the side of the road are dead, with no one bothering to cut it down. There are rotting buses, trucks and cars by the side of the road, the kind which is seen near traffic police stations in Kerala. Just like those abandoned towns shown in zombie movies. It was 10:30 pm, but I saw old ladies sitting with a few fruits in their baskets under street lamps. People were lying in charpais, there are charpais in wide junctions. I haven’t seen so many people living in streets in any of our cities so far, there were makeshift awnings put up, with full lives lived in the open. So many people sitting calmly in the side of the road, autorickshaws with 4 people in the driver seat, bikes carrying three people, cycle rickshaws, taxis coming head on, scream at each other and passing – tableaus passing by, which should have been from an old Hindi movie. In between I thought whether the driver is abducting me and this is not the right way.​

In between I thought I saw someone washing something in water in the gutter, but then I thought I must have imagined. It had rained before, so water was pouring into the gutter from inner alley ways. In one junction, when the taxi stopped at light, I saw a family – a man was drying himself after a bath, a women with wet hair after a fresh bath, they were bathing from the milky white water that was rushing through into the gutter. A kid is washing the few vessels and a sieve. I had to voluntarily grunt to keep control, to suppress the shame and pain. Everything is in a yellow haze of 40 watt bulbs – people in sleeveless banians, laboring
inside shops which must be 100 years old, still looking exactly same way, decaying and everyone putting up with the corpse. This is how far the one of the most intelligent people of this country have come to?

It is not like I am from an affluent state, feigning shock seeing poverty in Kolkata, as some foreigners are expected to. I am from Kerala, twin brother of West Bengal – along with Tripura, states where communism is deep rooted, where being veg includes fish and football crazy people. When I started, my friends were saying, for Bengalis the onsite is now Kerala, so when I reach there they might welcome me as we welcome foreign tourists in Kerala. It is just the same in some respects – one of the biggest sources of revenue for Kerala is remittance from expatriates, we work hard but mostly outside the country. Now in turn most of the construction work and other manual labor in Kerala is done by Bengalis and Biharis.

In some of the western countries, being communist is as much a bad thing as being a Nazi. But not for us – we still eulogize strong communists who fought for the working masses, who are idealists and humanists. As someone said, if you are not a communist when you are young, there is something wrong with you and if you are a communist when you are old enough, then also something is wrong with you. Present age communists in Kerala are nowhere near the legends and it is worse in West Bengal. But is this what a long communist rule could do to a state? Like how Cuba looks in pictures. Or is it due to something else – a city being this way
for centuries, not able to change, don’t have means to change, wed to the prison built by them, adjusting to the Stockholm Syndrome. There would have been 100 pictures of Deedi throughout the way – every bus stand, every junction has her photo. There she is speechifying to her people, there she is in a muslim headscarf praying in Ramadan greeting. Does she not see how the people who idolize her as Deedi lives?

When do we grow out of the Ammas, Deedis, Mulayams, Lalus and Babas? Why don’t we get better leaders? Or maybe they are not the problem in the first place. I know the obvious answer is that all of us are lazy, interested in arm chair activism or opinionating just like I did now. May be this is how it will always be, we are great at “adjusting”..