STORYTELLER - SABARNA ROY

Dreams [end of 2011]

2011-12-21T15:41:00.001+05:30

You dream of your life in waves
In
Your dreams of deaths
And
In
Your dreams of homes
And
Then you dream
And
Then you dream of dreams
As you walk down the gray aisles of your mausoleum of dreams
Your dreams change
Your life does not for you have no life without dreams
You dream
Of a wooded villa
Of a sunflower field
Of a paddy field
Of rain frozen on railway tracks
Of heat rising
Of a bunch of crows waiting on a electric wire
Of an empty stadium on a moonlit night
Of faces – sparkling and emaciated
Of bodies – scented and decaying
Of hunger – shooting
Of thirst – cracking
Of lust – animal and familial
Of shadows and shafts of light
Of closed spaces, of abandoned spaces
Of hooded faces
Of arrows, machine guns, harpoons, landmines and rocket launchers
Of funeral pyres, coffins and excavated pits
You dream
Of you chasing and being chased, in spiraling loops
Of you jumping through air and falling
Of you leading a heist
Of you managing a wild circus
Of you dancing across oceans, clouds and continents
You dream of your life in waves
In
Your dreams of deaths
And
In
Your dreams of homes
A faceless man croons in your ears:
Our planet is a stage, overflowing
You are a phantom in an endless opera
Entertaining the faraway stars, constellations and galaxies
You came lonely from a faraway mist and will certainly vanquish in that mist
In between you are torn between a billion dreams

Few Posts and Consumer Reviews relating to my Books

2011-12-15T12:08:00.003+05:30

Posts

http://bookreviews.bookrack.in/2011/11/abyss-by-sabarna-roy_22.html
http://www.anaggh.com/2011/11/27/pentacles-abyss-by-sabarna-roy.html
http://bookreviews.bookrack.in/2011/12/pentacles-by-sabarna-roy.html
http://www.anaggh.com/2011/12/11/frosted-glass-by-sabarna-roy.html
http://bookreviews.bookrack.in/2011/11/pentacles-by-sabarna-roy.html
http://bookreviews.bookrack.in/2011/11/abyss-by-sabarna-roy.html
http://bookreviews.bookrack.in/2011/11/pentacles-by-sabarna-roy.html
http://bookreviews.bookrack.in/2011/11/abyss-by-sabarna-roy.html

Consumer Reviews

http://www.flipkart.com/books/9380154824
http://www.flipkart.com/books/9381115091
http://www.flipkart.com/books/9381115367

Kolkatadreams

http://www.kolkatadreams.com/2011/10/author-sabarna-roy-books.html

A recent interview given to iSahitya

2011-12-09T13:42:00.000+05:30

http://isahitya.com/index.php/english-sahitya/interviews/193-talk-to-isahitya-sabarna-roy

On a few General Cricketing Matters.

2011-11-11T11:17:00.000+05:30

1. According to me the 3 greats of modern cricket are Sunil Manohar Gavaskar, Viv Richards and Imran Khan. They apart from playing the game to the best of their ability, have also left an indelible imprint on the game: they snatched the imagination and aesthetics of the game from the colonizer’s universe to the ghettos of the colonized and not only that, they had taken head-on the machinations of their respective national cricketing power-centers during the peak of their careers without ever caring for their own future [and in doing so changed the course of the game completely in their own countries]. My words are euphemistic to an extent, I agree, but they are true in spirit. When I was growing up I witnessed these tigers prowling on the cricket field [most of the times conjuring great battles in my soul listening to radio commentary – extremely evocative in those days] and feel very strange [almost convulsing] and implicitly life-changing sensations and emotions akin to what I undergo when I read the greatest of the novels. Mr. Gavaskar has had the greatest impact on me. I have rarely idolized anybody except this man. In many critical situations of my life I have asked myself silently: What would Mr. Gavaskar have done in such a situation; how would he have responded to the impending ambiguity that I face? Nowadays I feel sad when I find him, incipiently and tacitly, furthering the interests of the cricket establishment without cautioning the death of the game in the seductive hands of the T20 format. In that sense Imran and Viv have been very vocal; in fact, in India Bishen Singh Bedi has been very vocal too. Imran has traveled to a greater stage; I hope [I more or less believe] there is a part in his soul that genuinely bleeds for the sordid situation Pakistan is in at present and he is not just creating a crescendo to get a slice of the cake in the power corridors of Pakistan. I do not know much what Viv does nowadays. I was delighted to find him expert-commentating on TV during the recently concluded World Cup. He has mellowed, no doubt [collateral damage of being sired], but one can occasionally trace that familiar strain of the ‘King’s’ irreverence in his tone and body language.

2. I must confess I am a great admirer of Sourav Ganguly, of his batting style as well as his leadership flair. However I believe Greg Chappel’s quotes [based on the extracts I have read in the media] about Sourav to be essentially true. In his struggle to remain captain of the Indian cricket team he jeopardized his own game. He became a prisoner of the ever-powerful-syndrome; I suspect this has something to do with his privileged upbringing. When somebody becomes more anxious to remain the captain instead of improving his own performance and aspires to manipulate the system to achieve so, it speaks equally of the system that generates such individuals as much as it speaks about the individuals. The fact is the sensation of being powerful has defocused many a great in the course of history. Yet there was something in Sourav’s cricketing personality and style of playing the game which had lent a very appealing, attractive, edgy and restless quality - very similar what a rock-star does to a song. He had the natural flair of leading greater players than him, he could bring out the best in the minions, and his instincts on the sinusoidal course of a game were brilliant.

Most Recent Observations

2011-11-09T14:41:00.000+05:30

1. Former President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam by commenting on the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant has clarified where he belongs. It is perverse to note that while supporting the Nuclear Power Plant he does not put forth any scientific argument of credibility or merit and in fact, he has dished out a grand rehabilitation package thereby creating more room for attendant businesses. He makes a show off of this package and justifies the Plant, retrospectively, in the light of this package. He does not address the fundamental questions relating to long-term emission / radiation hazards and dumping of nuclear waste [among many], especially, the fears and anxieties arising out of and in the backdrop of the Fukushima incident and a few significant European companies exiting this business. The resistance of the local people and the environmental activists has been traced to the ‘foreign hand’ – that is what he alleges. But my view in this case is: the former President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam is the ‘foreign hand’; he does not represent the concerns of the people of Kudankulam; he is the high profile representative [comprador] of big corporations.

2. The mainstream media in India does not update us on the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ movement. Is this a deliberate move? One will doubt considering the space and airtime it gives to the Team Anna and Mr. Advani’s bogus yatra. Well one can argue its [Occupy Wall Street’s] relevance to India. I think ‘Occupy Wall Street’ in more ways than one is critically significant because of its nature: it is a political movement at its core without an aspirational and conventional political leadership – it is trying to hit at the classical motive of all big corporations in the world, which is, unhindered moneymaking by subjugating the natural resources comprehensively to its whims and fancy, by converting political systems all across the globe to its business development and marketing teams thereby ruining the planet in the short term – unrelenting economic recession and food crisis – and in the long term – ecological devastation and climate change. If the mainstream media in India can cover endlessly [at times exceedingly and using jingoistic jargon] skirmishes / infiltrations on the Indo-Pak, Indo-Chinese and Indo-Bangladesh borders [without for a moment understanding the underlying economic, territorial and long pending political disputes] why cannot it cover this movement round-the-clock and from all across the globe? Because the media [mostly] beyond a point does not want to paint a destructive image of big corporations [of which it is a part]; it plays out either its developmental image in the times of good business or its victimhood in the times of recession. The media covers the cotton theme in the Lakme Fashion Week with aplomb, but fails to tell us the story of suicide-deaths of cotton weavers with equal intensity. Will ‘Occupy Wall Street’ be a winning movement? The answer is simple – of course, not. My answer is – human greed is all pervasive and million-times more cunning than melodramatic.

3. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has shamelessly [without any visible shade of remorse] reacted to the surging food inflation. He says – food prices are increasing because there is an unprecedented rise in demand; which means, we are eating more because we can afford to eat more. This is far from true. It is an insult to the people when its leader endorses falsehood thereby erasing all hopes of economic corrections that could be made in the future to ease the burden of the people.

4. Ms. Mamata Banerjee is a specialist of somersaults, this time she did it in the name of withdrawing her support from the UPA Government at the Centre on the issue of rise in petrol prices. She is bargaining a special economic package for the state of West Bengal; the idea is noble. The package in one form or the other is on its way. But West Bengal should not rejoice which despite, all the mandatory caveats and cautions, it will. A sizeable section of the money will be siphoned out in the due process of executing capital projects to make TMC guys among the wealthiest politicians in the country [well, owner’s pride neighbour’s envy!]. Once the Left is out after 34 years what has come to light in its entirety is the holistic extent to which the Left had depraved West Bengal in this time-span – especially, in the health and education sectors. However, TMC’s response to the recent child deaths and only concentrating on the Presidency College / University to make it a clone of the Oxford University is terribly depressing to say the least.

3 Poems - 1 from a friend and 2 from her friend

2011-10-01T11:18:00.001+05:30

Unmasked [Deepa Vanjani from Indore]

The mask I wore for you was not good enough
Though different, from the masks I put on for others –
Different masks for different situations and people
Gradually cracks appeared in it.
The gaps became wider,
From within the pains of the past could now be seen.
The ugly face behind the mask repulsed you.
You were not prepared for it.
You shrunk.
You seethed.
You hissed.
You shunned me.
And now the mask has fallen apart.
The lines on my face are clearly visible.
Deep aberrations, lacerations on the soul,
Manifested on the face.
I don’t put on masks anymore.
I have left the lacerations to bleed openly.

Illusion [Rashmi Sahi from Hong Kong]

Farce is the promise of love

Misleading is its desire.

Mirage is the call of heart

Masquerade, the emotion.

Masked are the real faces

Enveloped in passion

Veiled are the hearts

Caught in the treason.

Time [Rashmi Sahi from Hong Kong]

It’s time to move on,

Time to change the nest

Time to dry the wings

Time to fly again.

Cheetah and Blast from the Past

2011-09-24T16:45:00.000+05:30

The Immortal Cheetah

A cheetah given into leaping by nature

Leapt across swamps of grief

Crossing miles in air

Feeling the rush of wind in his eyes

He was crying – tasting the salt of his tears in his eyes and on his tongue

The indigo stars illuminating the silence of the universe with a strange tinge of blue sighed: Oh god! The cheetah is crying!

The cheetah flies in the air almost daring to cross the planet with a half-leap

Falling all of a sudden through midair as if he had crashed into an invisible cliff trapped within a canopy of clouds

Falling inside a jungle: a boiling cauldron of darkness, incessant rain and violent vegetation

The celestial bodies in the sky prayed for the cheetah – with the finest bones and flesh ever to find their unified life – to make his final motions against the entrapments of this fateful jungle

Nobody knows what happened to this cheetah

Except that we make yarns about this cheetah, who leaps inside our souls forever

Jump cut – in the past – 25 years – almost – approximately – a full-moon night – after midnight – on the terrace of a G+3 newly built apartment block – on the fringes of the city violently pushing against the margins of a crumbling suburban landscape – full of dreams – a series of conquests – a bright disc of silver hanging in the sky – an elderly friend of mine and I – a telescope in between us – a gazer of stars and galaxies – well, planning to show me what is a sky and infinite continents of space – a wise man – hating my absolute love for rock music – dismissing it as ‘boyish elitism’.

A night redefined!

We smoked hard. We smoked hard – only nicotine fellas! We discussed Dakghar. We recited Wasteland. Death was looming large on our sub-conscious.

Then he asked me to take a drooling walk to the phallic instrument chilling in the night – his love and work of love.

“Boy you could look at the moon both ends from! This end from it looks like a shining piece of nut. And this end from it blazes on you like a scorching sun … So you see; there is nothing right or wrong!”

I asked parched in smoke, “Is there no perfect way of life on earth? Ideals to follow? Creating and adding on to the civilization of men? No right and wrong! Live like dogs, do we?”

He whispered in my ears, “You hate dogs, don’t you? There are ways. There are no ways still. A creative man must learn to suffer multiple takes on life. A creative man must strive for his absolute solitude to unburden his load on us. He walks through the world but returns to his cave. Your cave is this universe of galaxies, constellations and pacing heavenly bodies. You are a banished soul attempting to be a part of this colossal space. Don’t you feel like that? How tiny you are, my boy!”

We fell silent for a long time – looking at the sky – and then we fell asleep! Dreaming: this sleep will take us away …

2 Observations [Predictions]

2011-09-15T12:25:00.001+05:30

I want to make 2 observations:

1. The disconnect between urban, semi-urban, mofusil settlements, villages and forests has attained a critical mass in India that is likely to result in a series of violent civil-war like situation in the next 5 years. This disconnect primarily relates to wide disparity of economic opportunities, concentration of private wealth and assets and access to natural resources across sections. It is essentially a fallout of rapidly shifting of national economy from communal and traditional food production to laying integral focus on industrialization and high-technology services following [actually succumbing to] the vested interests pursued by the large commercial corporations of a economically globalized world [where political systems whether democratic or otherwise are more or less subservient to the commercial interests of large corporations]. The central and the state governments are coercively pushing forward a development agenda based on mass-scale industrialization, urbanization and converting all kinds of labour into technology driven manufacturing. As such, the urban localities are directly eating up vast volumes of resources leaving very little for others. So the urban areas are extending into farmlands and farmlands into forests. This is of course creating terrific levels of human migration [which goes incipient most of the times] and irreversible destruction of ecology. Most importantly these speculated civil wars spread across regions within forests, at the fringes of forests and towns and affluent centers of metropolitan cities are likely to be sporadic, very violent, sustained yet non-cohesive giving one an impression of mindless rioting, looting and arson as they would lack any comprehensive political leadership [I’m not taking cue from the recent London riots because they were not civil wars by any stretch of imagination]. The State and the mainstream media would be as insensitive as ever – religiously upholding the sacred nature of our Constitution and Parliament – to these perpetrators of mob violence. They would treat it as a law and order crisis and thus react with greater degrees of security intervention: the States’ Police and the Armed Forces will start killing increasing number of Indian citizens in due course. Acute hunger and impoverishment coupled with years and years of neglect relating to identity crisis of people living in Kashmir and the Northeast and that of the minorities and the perennially disadvantaged [Dalits etc] would land us into a spiraling darkness of mayhem and chaos. However what this would end up underlining emphatically is questioning of the very tenets and assumptions of: Nationhood, Political Democracy and the belief that Institutionalization of all functions can deliver equitable and just results for people at large and organization of operations at a magnum scale. We must ponder: whether we want things to become so big and so overpowering as to make us feel helpless in negotiating its consequences in the long run; is the idea of living collaboratively in stateless communities an idea worth pursuing; is an economy based on barter of goods and services considering survival requirements a more balanced and holistic economy compared to a currency economy … well, there are many things likewise to ponder! If our contemplation remotely convinces us that these ideas could be worth dying for [I actually mean worth living for in spite of the embedded consciousness in the human animal that makes this strange animal continuously susceptible to exploring newer and meaner power structures in the name of ideas and having accepted this anthropological truth one can only understand the true nature of this rebellion is against your own natural self]; the larger question would still remain: how and where do we start; how do we negotiate with the accumulators and multipliers of assets and lobbies of unassailable power in ensuring our way to leading a contended, small, zero-development life. Or, is it because we know subconsciously that choosing such a path might make us tread the harshest of harsh, scorching by-lanes and labyrinths that Michael K had traversed [I recommend a reading of J.M.Coetze’s Life and Times of Michael K] that we are convinced a spectacle of fire and violence is a better choice to put an end to oneself if not the man-made power structures and towers constructed in the name of humanity!

2. Globally in the next 5 years we will find a substantive reversal of technological interventions. Technology until now has been earning its maximum revenues from: gadgetry [evolving and satisfying intense consumerist aspirations] and warfare. It is prolonging life spans at one end whereas helping conduct our businesses and transactions much faster [the speed is enhancing every passing year] leaving us with unending pools of time. We are a baffled and bewildered lot as we do not know what we should do with such large gaps in time. What was the time taken to seduce a woman in the 2nd decade of the eighteenth century? What was the time taken to seduce a woman in the 2nd decade of the nineteenth century? And, now? Well, the 3 figures would seem to be in geometric progression in a telescopic descending order. That tells us something; simply put the fun of an exploit is gone. So we get very easily bored. [I recommend a reading of Milan Kundera’s Slowness in this connection]. You can decimate a country by directing missiles from 2000 miles away – well, that is another big contribution of technology. But to win a war comprehensively you need to win in a land battle that requires raw courage, organization, planning and sheer mental strength – some things which are clearly not derivatives of technology. Afghanistan and Iraq are cases in point. I am inclined to believe long life spans with loads of idle-time on hand can actually lead to a very different kind of violence arising out of relentless boredom. An understanding is slowly descending about the farcical nature of extending life on expensive, invasive and exclusive life support systems. Technology has also altered the appreciation of the natural sciences which is nothing but your unending conversations with the silence of the universe [there was a time when pursuing astrophysics was sexier than becoming a computer engineer; it soon got changed; the process is likely to be reverted although interventions of the industry may not allow such a move so easily]. The split between technology and science is being gradually understood in a more explicit manner. Technology is no longer innovation [at its core an audacious defiance of nature] of goods and materials based on the principles of natural science; it is something much more colossal: it has become a way of life – it panders to the whole idea of modernity [hyper-cool; monstrously big beaming an image of power and success; integrating – making distances look shorter and thus deriving an unimaginable control of transport; simulating pace; reducing costs and thus becoming more and more profitable in commerce]. It took many, many, and many … yes, many years for our brains to evolve to create the kinds of art and literature we have made over the years. But the news is: our brains have started evolving very differently now in this world of digitization and we are soon on the verge of losing critical anthropological traits of identity – handwriting per se!

4 Concerning Issues

2011-09-15T12:14:00.004+05:30

4 issues for concern:

1. Mr. Narendra Modi will go on a fast starting 17 September for 3 days. He wants to build a stronger and unified [the words used are peaceful and harmonious] Gujarat / India; integrating people of all communities and shades. This must be one of the most obscene jokes that can actually make you cry! The Supreme Court [SC] is becoming very popular of late because of its activism in the corruption cases, which are essentially corporate crimes of a monumental magnitude. While the SC cannot be faulted on technical merits in the Gujarat case – relegating the lower court in Gujarat to decide on dispute of facts – however one ponders whether going by the background and climate of the events under question it should have worded and safeguarded its judgment in a manner so as to insulate it from being manipulated and misused by the political masters in furthering their personal agendas – Mr. Modi is not fighting for the BJP at this moment; he is fighting within the BJP for his space to become its nominated PM candidate in the national elections of 2014.

2. Listening to the interviews given by Mr. Anna Hazare to NDTV, CNN-IBN and TIMESNOW I get a feeling he is much smarter than what he sounded between and during the 2 fasts conducted at Delhi recently. There is a group working with and behind him invisibly who are aware that with the irreversible fall of the Parliamentary Left there is a space that requires filling: the space belonging to the anti-right [anti-Congress and anti-BJP to be specific]. As such this group is fast extending its articulation to multifarious subjects apart from the Janpal Lok Pal Bill, which has been their principal talking point until now. If they tend to be aspirational, which they seem to be at the moment, they are likely to switch over to a structured political formation from their NGO style of operation and hit the roof to enter the political system. While NGOs can aspire to get issue-based funding, a political formation requires substantial amounts of money on a sustained basis to win elections to be of some relevance. Who will fund them and why?

3. Ms. Mamata Banerjee clearly runs a party made up of goons. That is the story unfolding in Bengal for the moment. It is not in her capacity to control this mess. She will be heard making a few loud sound bytes against her own party men and women; very soon she will switch over to a mode of ignorance to be followed by a mode of denial. The Left in Bengal [I mean whatever is left of them] is only shouting from rooftops against TMC’s atrocities against their party cadres and forceful shutting down of their offices. Nobody is listening to them, actually they are not interested and in many a case people are happy that the arrogant Left is getting a good thrashing and being roughed up so ruthlessly. What is absolutely missing the Left by zillions of miles is: they have to go back to the ways of painstakingly organizing economic movements, social movements and political movements from the grassroots to be able to reengineer their organization. To me the Left, which actually believes the madness of the TMC will automatically usher them in a resounding comeback victory after 5 years in spite of its tired [almost extinct] leadership and uninspiring cadres, can never make a meaningful come back.

4. Mr. Mani Shankar Aiyar is a strange phenomenon, well rather a strange oratorical fashion icon. He is deeply entrenched inside the capillaries of a centre-right political party and yet he mouths uproariously all kinds of leftist and at times ultra-leftist talks. Talking, of course, one has to admit he does it quite well. But the point is very few political personalities exhibit this dichotomous [what kind of a jerk can imagine that words like ‘dichotomous’ are only known to a breed named Stephanians!!] proclivity so effectively. Strangely he is never slapped with charges of sedition or abetting militancy / extremism!

An Open Letter to Americans by Nadim Asrar

2011-09-11T11:52:00.002+05:30

http://ibnlive.in.com/blogs/nadimasrar/2942/62696/an-open-letter-to-americans-on-a-decade-of-911.html

Irom Sharmila by Rajdeep Sardesai

2011-09-11T11:50:00.002+05:30

http://ibnlive.in.com/blogs/rajdeepsardesai/1/62692/iroms-cause-is-riskier-to-support-annas-is-safe.html

New Book - Abyss

2011-08-01T17:00:00.002+05:30

http://books.rediff.com/book/abyss//ISBN:9789381115367/96860049

Press Release

2011-08-01T16:13:00.000+05:30

http://mycubiclespace.com/mcs/classifieds/view.do?type_id=10&id=9164

On Karl Marx and Inside a Bazaar

2011-07-18T15:09:00.001+05:30

1.

Whenever Karl Marx talked of progressive development he actually referred to industrialization, rapid urbanization and agriculture gradually feeding into the requirements of an industrialized world although under the leadership of the proletariat post-revolution during the evolution of the socialist phase. He also envisioned socialism paving way for a communist world order eventually where nation-states would cease to exist and communes and cooperatives would abound. He could not visualize the gainful investments the capitalist and imperialist world would do to counter the threat of socialist revolutions and other related economic and cultural movements world-wide on a sustainable basis, which continues till this day. The problem is: Karl Marx overestimated the power of industrialization on human development (in fact, he failed to see industries as the single largest causative factor of human underdevelopment in the years to come); he was happy once the means of production changed hands from a few rich capitalists to the large masses of the poor proletariat. Karl Marx here made the same mistake regarding the power of numbers as the proponents of democracy do instead of challenging the basic concept. The twentieth century has experienced the power of industries: they almost converted themselves into empires and thereby controlling the millions of lives of people in every possible way through modern institutions and appropriating every shade and shadow of our lives in economic and financial terms and brought the ecological fabric to near ruin. The fact is the very nature of an industry is such that it has to be run by extremely individualistic ruthless creative and economic gaming. Industry cannot operate like a cooperative or a government department. In fact in an industrialized world everything exists to support industry and not otherwise. I do not think Karl Marx foresaw this (his diagnosis of capitalism bringing the world to an end was restricted to capitalists being in control of industries in place of the proletariat) and his principles of socialism melting into communism were unrealistic until and unless of course the concepts of industrialization and urbanization themselves were challenged.

Yet at about the same time (or, period) two litterateurs – Tolstoy and Rabindranath – were vehement in their concerns against the burgeoning of an industrial world order. Tolstoy very clearly denounced the laying of railway lines in Russia (in Anna Karenina) and predicted thereby the plundering of the farmlands and faster transportation (or, loot) of food and grains from villages to the growing cities and causing middlemen to rise in between impoverishing the farmers (the producers) and causing crisis of food-stock in the villages where the grains were cultivated in the first place.

Rabindranath conceptually had gone ahead: he had attacked the western idea of nation-state consistently.

2.

I was in a bazaar a few nights back. It was raining. I was looking for a shop, which in my memory existed at the northern end of a labyrinth dotted on its flanks by millions of similar dimly lit shops selling all kinds of items. There were many such labyrinths in this bazaar. I had to move past wet bodies circuitously saving my head and eyes from umbrellas getting in the way. Sometimes I felt I was in a wrong labyrinth or entering the right labyrinth from the wrong end and forgetting the direction of my traverse midway. After two hours of trudging through slushy mud and filth and my head feeling heavy with the beatings of rain drops – thick columns – I doubted whether I was in the right bazaar or it existed in another city somewhere in another time and which did not exist anymore. And when I was speculating whether I should make an exit from this bazaar where I was in and if yes, from where so; this guy appeared before me – disheveled, worn out, drenched, emaciated and in tattered clothes. From his eyes I knew, I knew him. He looked at me intensely almost bafflingly puzzling with a strain of a fleeting smile on its greenish irises. When I was trying to pull myself out of his magnetic gaze he spoke out coolly: Sandy you seem to have made improvements to your life. Yes, I can see that. But man, I am contracted not to die as I have people to take care of.

On Gabbar Singh and Education

2011-07-05T14:53:00.000+05:30

1.

One of the most enduring dialogues of Hindi cinema is: Jo dar gaya woh mar gaya! Meaning – One who gives in to fear is dead! It was mouthed by a jungle baddie, wild-eyed heartless bandit, Gabbar Singh. Gabbar, as a word always reminded me of another Hindi word: gubbara, meaning – balloon! How many balloons of ruthless toxins would have made one Gabbar – is anybody’s guess. Gabbar was in direct conflict with an upper-class landlord also perceived by his villagers as their sole protector against the merciless ploys of Gabbar taxing them perpetually on their farm yields (thus confronting the landlord economically because the ownership of the farmlands must be with the Thakur – the landlord). Ironically, this landlord is also a senior policeman of an emerging Republic constitutionally mandated to do away with the zamindari system and more significantly this Thakur having lost both his hands to Gabbar’s gut-wrenching violence employs two urban, fearless, extremely good-looking, sexy criminals in his personal war against Gabbar Singh. Well, we all know the story for we have seen the film many, many times over. What I like to ponder is Gabbar’s unique identification of fear as a thin dividing line between what we experience as life (as in existing) and our mental speculation of what death is or can be (which among the ravines where Gabbar lived with his gang facing the ravages of nature first-hand can be almost equivalent to actual dying).

2.
Modern urban education is increasingly driven by moronic aspirations of the school and college owners, book publishers, teachers, accessory manufacturers, training centers and an unimaginative bureaucracy and groups of educationists drawing up syllabus and curriculum on various Boards all designed to kill contemplation and thinking capabilities of students and learners at an early age. The problem is: How to produce non-thinkers out of guys who get helluva of marks (let’s say something like 98.3%)? Education has gradually converted itself to a viable industry by replicating the texture and cascading sequence of manufacturing units as we find elsewhere that is of a fully-integrated main plant surrounded by ancillaries both online as well as offline. A post-modern nation-state to thrive requires a bunch of people who know a lot and can store monumental quantum of data and thus is so blocked with loads of information and computational skills that thoughts are mortified to enter such constricted minds. Thoughts – that can move and break planets – require leisure, enjoyment, happiness and harmony as an ambience to the process and pursuits of learning. Loading a child with a mammoth syllabus annihilates the process of learning but is extremely good for business for as learning becomes more and more and more difficult you will pay more and more and more to get it (remember diamonds). More importantly the goal of education in a post-modern nation-state is much more than inculcation of learning (what you read and write) but to instill a value (as in frenzied hammering of an iron-nail to a soft piece of timber) among its recipients that competition under the most difficult of circumstances is almost akin to essential survival. Since in the process one makes competition all-pervasive (one is always and constantly fighting against the other and also at one level against oneself) one implicitly starts believing in the omnipotence and utilitarian values of war and even concludes: there can be no life without war. Collaboration soon becomes a bad idea. A post-modern nation-state wants this and the masters of the Corporations who run the show in absentia just love to see their foot-soldiers being manufactured in laboratories who embrace Shakespeare, Trigonometry, Laws of Motion, Periodic Table, Genetics, Rabindranath, mysteries of the Mughal Empire, Charter of the United Nations and Topo-sheets (readers may like to refer to the ICSE Syllabus for Class X which is nothing short of being offensive and rude to the idea of being humane) with the same comfort as dirty clothes take to the jostling ugly vortices of moving water inside the cavity of a washing machine.

On Literature and Secularism.

2011-06-12T10:43:00.002+05:30

Good quality literature – fiction, non-fiction, poetry – is rarely prescriptive in nature. Good writers eternally engage themselves in puncturing the cloud – amorphous, ambivalent, existential – with the flaming yearning to view what lies beneath and beyond. The truth is the cloud remains dimensionless and there are infinite clouds within the cloud. Yet literature in a deterministic manner explores and exposes – unlike theology or political doctrine – the ethic of existence (without moralizing or passing strictures or judgments) as bestowed upon us by nature. I will explain. We know Anna Karenina does not end with the death of Anna on the railway tracks. It ends with the birth of Levin’s and Kitty’s child and Levin’s understanding of what he should do in life to sustain a bundle of life with whom he shares that almost strange and mysterious connection that exists between the creator and the created. I have read these 50 / 60 pages many, many times and they have in a sense made me realize the ethic (no, not responsibility) of a parent to his or her child. It is very different from a Parenting Manual, my dears! Rabindranath’s Dakghar and Raktakarabi simmer with complex ethical questions of life, existence, death and statehood.
Secularism is a religion too. It is a product of modernity based on industrial economics and hegemony of nation-state founded on the key principles of capitalism and free-market economy. Pamuk’s Snow reveals this fact like no other book. Secularism is very different from other religions in the sense that while other organized religions try to lay down moral codes of conduct for people secularism lays down its moral code of conduct for a nation-state. Strictly, while secular states might exist secular individuals cannot for it was not meant for them. I must add here to avoid misunderstanding: I’m an atheist and not a follower of any religion including secularism for I’m not a nation-state. Yet I’ve craved all my life for a god to keep faith to tide over my tormenting moments of despair and desolation although it has never shown its face to me. It is not as if I’m a radical because of which I’m an atheist. In fact in my early childhood I conducted a crude experiment of holding my fear against a curse directed towards me by a family elder. This made me realize: God does not exist but Evil does for I had committed something purely devilish to have attracted such a curse in the first place!

7 Questions and Answers

2011-05-26T16:30:00.000+05:30

Q: What are the greatest inventions of mankind?

A: Time and words; history would be very different without these two.

Q: How do you differentiate between man and animals?

A: Man can imagine death and home, which clearly animals cannot. What would life be without the imagination of death! What would life in the wilderness be without the imagination of home!

Q: What is the most difficult thing to imagine?

A: Nothingness! Like how was it when the universe started.

Q: Which is the fiercest form of love?

A: Between a parent and a child. However in the end all love is moderate. When one understands it one is bestowed with a unique solitude for a sighting of a sky without the mediation of dreams can connect your soul with the greatest motions of the universe.

Q: Are we experiencing the last stages of the human civilization?

A: Yes we are. There cannot be a probabilistic answer for it will mean nothing. Man has embarked on a full scale war in every sphere – political, economic and religious. It is highly beneficial to a set of people who matter. The deterministic answer is – it is embedded in man’s consciousness to destroy because of its unrelenting desire to accumulate and acquire (or, let’s say create and recreate).

Q: Can fear of god and healing touch of love reverse the war mongering trend of the human race?

A: Of course not! On the contrary god and love are good enough reasons to go to an endless war.

Q: What is then the greatest learning of all?

A: That nothing would matter; to you or anybody else – whether you did x or y or –x or zz or abc! We are bodies in essence to be vanquished in the long run! But if you wanted to quit – not will against body (that is killing yourself) but your body against your own body (as in running away) – you will be tracked and quarantined and treated like you would do to an alien.

On Sourav Ganguly

2011-05-07T16:43:00.002+05:30

I am a great admirer of Sourav Ganguly for the attitude he has imparted to the Indian Cricket Team. I was very sad when his cricketing career was almost forcefully truncated by the powers that be and later at the humiliation he had to face during the recently concluded IPL auction. Now he is back at IPL IV in the Pune Warriors outfit as a replacement to Ashish Nehera! Did he have to go this far to play the game? Is it because of the money? Is it because of pride? Is it because of unrelenting passion for the game? Or, is it because the dugout is an easy conduit for a player (with aspirations to control the future of the game) to the lobbies that decide the faces for powerful positions in the State Associations, later in the BCCI and far later in the ICC? If Dada says he is doing this to prove himself he is doing great injustice to his own body of work and his millions of admirers.

A few questions relating to Osama bin Laden’s death

2011-05-07T16:42:00.000+05:30

Osama bin Laden is believed to have been employed by the CIA during the 1980s with direct financial, tactical, strategic and physical support of all kinds to create an army of men to fight the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan (which itself was illegal, inhuman, unethical and unjust). Political Islam took shape to provide bonding cover to men recruited in this war apart from the financial support their families received to give up their men for this war. There is documented evidence to support these claims. Yet the USA administration has never for once apologized to the world at large for nurturing this man and making him capable of what he was to do in the later years against their interests when they turned the heat on him. Why?
Can one employ the best Chartered Accountants in the world with an objective to understand the amount of revenues earned by the American, English, French, Australian and German military engineering, equipment supplying and contracting companies directly and indirectly after 9/11 in the name of providing security to its own people, going to war in Afghanistan and Iraq to decimate the causative factors of international modern terrorism and later to rebuild and reconstruct these countries from a heap of rubbles that they had been converted into during the war because the governments of these first world countries continuously exaggerated threats of terrorism and terrorists to hysteric levels?
It is being informed that a detainee at Guantanamo Bay had leaked the details of Osama bin Laden’s courier to his abode at Abottabad. Could this be a ploy to re-legitimize the concept and style of Guantanamo Bay?
The technology, reach, manpower, money, manipulative skills and collaboration that are available with the USA in its war on terror is so huge that it is practically impossible to gauge their length and breadth. Yet it takes so many years to find an ageing and ailing fugitive. Doesn’t it sound a bit strange? Immediately after the death of Osama bin Laden there have been painstaking announcements made by the American dignitaries of state that one should not underestimate the avenging capabilities of Al Qaida and how much of a potential threat to the world could such efforts be. This was as if to remind us that we should not ask them to stop their wars and war-games relating to counter-terrorism now that Osama bin Laden is dead. No?
Is there any court of law in any country (modern or despotic) that has established the crimes of Osama bin Laden? (Lest somebody should believe I am a fan of Osama bin Laden I must clarify that I believe he has been given an image so powerful that there is always an inclination to relate to him outside the domain of reality like you would treat mythical heroes and villains. I am more inclined to believe: he and his cohorts as a team form one head of a two-headed serpent – one head feeding on the other. The other head belongs to his creator and masters and their cohorts.)
Don’t we do away with all our civilization traits when we celebrate and delightfully glee at somebody’s death by murder even if he is allegedly the biggest criminal on earth?
The timing of the killing (initiating the presidential election campaign in the USA) and its style and later the flip-flop clarifications including the haste with which the DNA matching and the funeral were conducted are bound to raise uncomfortable questions for the USA. How many deaths would Osama have to die in the long run? Who will wear the face of Osama in future?
The modern world has spun a tragic helix comprising conflicting strains of wars and terrorism. The foot soldiers on both sides continue to die at each others hands while the top brass espouses causes and trades with the existence of life on earth. Is there a way out?

On Democracy

2011-05-07T16:40:00.002+05:30

Was at a friend’s place a few days back. Booze, smoke, small talk, big talk, bragging, failed attempts at groping in the dark, loud gulps of laughter at atrocious sms jokes – symptoms of an upwardly mobile class (nouveau rich which is mostly rich on hired money, inherited money and stolen money) – were floating dense in the air. I get bored with people too soon. So I was concentrating on cutlets and fries – well done and well made.

Suddenly a discussion erupted on the Bengal elections. People were clearly taking bipolar stands. I was asked about my views. Frankly I didn’t want to talk. Unrelenting silence coupled with endless munching of snacks in these circles is perceived as snobbish display of greed. So I thought I must break my silence. What I ended up speaking was not something that I intended to blabber here. My endless speech went thus:

“I’m not a great votary of democracy. I find in its original idea an attempt to fog the powerful behind a veil of large institutions – parliaments, courts, universities, police, publishing houses, rights groups and museums etc. Democracy is good at furthering and legitimizing industrial, technological and consumerist wars and associated interests. In a way both feed on each other to a great extent in a classical sense. In fact democracy is a good cause to bomb sovereign nations. Democracy requires people to be interlinked and integrated among and between nation states. This is brilliant from the point of view of accessing labour and consumer markets. Democracy takes away governments out of the ambit of people by assigning supreme power to the state of law as against state of nature. People vote between given choices and they think they are electing MPs and MLAs whereas all of us know it is not what we think. Elections increasingly are like mega-carnivals and create tremendous opportunities for business and wheeling-dealing. The political left and right both believe in parliamentary democracy! Large corporations and commercial interests have taken over every aspect of our lives in modern times: very subtly and at times grossly they select the leaders for us who will be beneficial to them but not us who have been rendered absolutely powerless by the might of statehood. So it really does not matter to us who comes to power.”

I was rebuked: “Stop lecturing us! Will you? If you have anything to say about the Bengal elections, puke!”

I continued pretty shamelessly devouring a bouquet of fish fingers: “The CPI (M) has been blocking policies (many a time rightly so) at the Parliament, which in essence they have been following in the WB and Kerala Assemblies. Why this conflict? Simple silly, because when you are in power you hobnob with the powerful and when you are not you can run into long intellectual discourse (like what I am doing now). Tell me: how many economic movements has the CPI (M) organized or stood by in the last 30 years? Contrarily they have thwarted all rebellion of the industrial workers, peasants, the dispossessed and the students in the last 3 decades in Bengal. Like the Congress they have appeased the more backward sections of the religious minorities. They definitely redistributed land (doing away with the ruthless and embedded zamindars and almost erasing the landless) but ended up controlling the peasants with small land holdings like feudal lords would treat the landless. People who are ideologically against SEZs should not be grabbing land cheap from farmers on behalf of large corporations. They should not be in hands-in-gloves with the building mafia. They should not be interfering in our personal lives as if we were in a concentration camp. But if you do not do these things you do not earn pennies and amass power worth enough to participate and win in elections. The TMC is a rudderless pathetic hate machine; its sole agenda is to dislodge the Left Front; they have no belief structure or vision for the state. They will do anything to win and then ruin by repeating the worst practices of the Left Front with enhanced efficiency. The Congress is eyeing an opportunity to throw out the Left Front based on the general perception that Mamata Banerjee after all is an honest anti-establishment leader who is capable of bringing imaginative changes to WB politics (she is the failing Railway Minister at the Center notwithstanding!!!). The Congress I believe has plans to make life as difficult as possible for the TMC if the TMC-Congress wrests power. In such a situation the TMC will eventually be removed with the Congress gradually climbing up the ladder of power. The Maoists seemingly want a new regime to regroup and remobilize in the intervening period. As such their close proximity with the TMC can be explained. But the Maoists will receive improved sodomy at the hands of the TMC-Congress when compared against what they have received from the CPI (M). Another thing: see the display of wealth and manpower that the Left Front used to exhibit a few years back has shifted to the TMC-Congress today including the quantum of employed lumpens. I’ve seen North Indian traders in Kolkata voting for the BJP in Union Elections whereas they voted for the Left Front in Assembly Elections. Strange, no? But today they want a change. People who are positioning today as protectors of farm land would in due course of time, if they come to power, become the greatest land-grabbers; there is no doubt about that. In case of the Left, people have already experienced such turnaround. So you see I do not have a clear-cut choice. Hence I do not have a place in your democracy.”

I was breathless by now!

Somebody confronted me: “Hold on, hold on for a second! What are you saying – elections are no good to us; we should be returning to monarchy, autocracy and feudalism?”

Did I say: “I’m not sure: where we can go back to. I’m sure democracy serves the interests of corporations better than that of smaller communities and individuals as people. The worst part is you cannot complain because democracy has institutionalized prescriptions for every malaise, which you of course cannot access. Democracy does not do away with monarchy, autocracy and feudalism as ideas or even in practice; it refines and alters them into more ruthless institutions within the realms of statehood and the sad part is at some point in history mankind has given up the power of individuals to the idea of forming a state of law that today has rendered us utterly powerless. This process I believe has been irreversible.”

A group of guys started grunting all of a sudden; god knows why! The discussion (or rather my one-sided trumpeting) ended and we started discussing polygamy after a pee-break. Wow! I made a vow not to speak on this subject at all.

Dr. Binayak Sen

2011-04-16T18:21:00.001+05:30

Yesterday, early afternoon, I received an sms from my sister who lives in Delhi: Supreme Court grants bail to Binayak Sen. I was at Dhanbad / Bokaro standing by River Damodar reviewing construction works of an upcoming water intake system of a steel plant. To put it simply I was delighted reading the sms; I took a break from the review and smoked 2 cigarettes back to back. I immediately shared the news with my colleagues. They were happy too. I was very worried since the day the Supreme Court had adjourned the bail hearing; the Chattisgarh government did not file their reply on time. I was very tense since yesterday morning about the outcome; we had had a brief speculative discussion about the outcome at the breakfast table where I was staying. It was a great relief to learn that the short term anxieties of Dr. Ilina Sen, Dr. Sen's 84 year old mother and his daughter had come to an end.

3 things:

This intervention by the Supreme Court is likely to bring greater focus to revision of outdated sedition laws.
How perverse is the Chattisgarh government? Ram Jethmalani, a BJP politician and a political comrade (on a wider scale) of this government, ended up fighting Dr. Sen's case in the Supreme Court for the injustice had reached a level where even he - a seasoned and first-rate criminal lawyer that he is - could not stand its moral burden.
The difference between movements surrounding activists Anna Hazare and Dr. Sen is: one is conducted on a large stage almost similar to a grand concert in full view of the media and the elite while the other happens trapped inside the suffocating darkness of our jungles and tribal backyards.

Death rattle Clan

2011-04-16T17:47:00.000+05:30

They forgot to put my body on fire

On freshly chopped logs of wood

On oil cracking and boiling

They forgot the charm of cotton ball plugs, the sight of wetted white petals of fecund flowers, the absent-minded twirl of smoke chains, incense sticks, the sonorous trail of holy hymns, crackling sounds of earthen pots and above all, the communal mourning around a corpse

Instead they hurled me down inside a pit – laboriously excavated, dark and deep

And, instantaneously covered it up with fast-setting slurry

With a sleight of hands that can be defeated only by mystic magicians at work

So, I exist there frosted miles below

From where you are waging your philosophical wars on trains against commuters struggling to reach their office on time, commissioning ecstatic cocaine soirees on yachts and rafts, executing orgies with strangers on a plane, stealing antiquity from private museums of nouveau billionaires

For you had told me once: I will blow up my life

Indoctrinating me with the scent of your body and introducing me to the nucleus of this explosive club: Death rattle Clan

What holds me here is an intricate web of undefined silence and darkness – so pure in form –

In this marsh of soil, water, plant roots and rotting flesh

You worry sometimes, don’t you; struggling in sleep:

Do I remember your face and touch as I crossed over the perimeter of life?

Do I know that your face is one among their faces?

Do I remember all their faces as distinctly as I should?

Do I remember our plot of blowing up our lives?

Might I end up sharing it with a fellow corpse?

Remembering and forgetting are complex phenomena even otherwise; more so after you’ve crossed the gate

Sometimes – nowadays – I will to laugh at our words – words crafted out of beliefs – mostly non-beliefs – yet preached with so much intensity, precision and timing – a way of time passing for all of us at this explosive club, Death rattle Clan

Frosted Glass

2011-04-06T18:13:00.002+05:30

A book comprising a story cycle of 14 stories and a poem cycle of 21 poems.
In the category of literature of metropolis.
Published by Frog Books (an imprint of Leadstart Publishing).
Being sold online and offline at bookstores.
The Frog Books link is at:
http://frogbooks.net/frog-books-leadstart-virgin-leaf-poolani/frosted-glass/

Pentacles

2011-04-06T18:07:00.001+05:30

A book comprising a long story and four long narrative poems in free verse.
In the category of literature of metropolis.
Published by Frog Books (an imprint of Leadstart Publishing).
Being sold online and offline at bookstores.
The Frog Books link is at:
http://frogbooks.net/frog-books-leadstart-virgin-leaf-poolani/pentacles/

A Conversation and An Incomplete Detective Story

2010-07-14T15:09:00.000+05:30

I met Mr.X a couple of weeks back at a smoky joint. We meet at irregular intervals to eat an elaborate meal and talk. Usually we talk ideas (methods of peaceful submission to death, ways to beat forgetfulness, how to keep in shape without dieting etc) and mostly about the deadline of extinction of the human race. Sometimes we discuss women and very rarely children and pornography. We also talk a lot about cricket and football and nowadays about badminton (pursuant to the consist performance of Saina Nehwal).
I am going to now reproduce the conversation from memory that I had with this man in the dimly-lit joint. While we talked (that night) there was no distracting music playing at the eatery. There was no much noise barring the whirring of the air-conditioners, the movement of the waiters, waiters talking to each other and other guests and the people eating or waiting for food talking to each other in hush-hush tones and the general cling-clong of cutlery. The absence of loud sounds, whether pleasant or unpleasant, helped me to focus all my energies to the occasion, especially the conversation. There have been other instances when we have been witness (of visual and audio type) to a brawl (between an arrogant waiter and a hyper anorexic salesman), a quarrel (between two aged fat men over what to order for dessert), a hot bombshell (in a pink top and a black skirt) and rendition of rock-and-roll music (1967 April number) on an ancient sound system: all highly disturbing and infringing experiences. The conversation (the one I referred to) went something like this –

I: You look thoughtful; no, I mean clouded with dark thoughts; so much so that you are actually looking dark!
Mr.X: It’s not untrue; my appetite has gone done. I don’t think about sex any more. I don’t fanaticize. I feel very tense, you know.
I: Tense? Tense about what? About losing your balls, you mean?
Mr.X: Do I have my balls at the right place; I’m not so sure? I’m actually anxious about my son.
I: Why; what has he done: fallen in love with your house-maid or what? Both of you are in competition, is it?
Mr.X: Be serious Mr.Y for a change! If I die now what will happen to my son; have you ever thought about that?
I: You expect me to think over such top-class shit. Are you truly contemplating suicide? Disappearance for a change: I mean something like that?
Mr.X: Suppose if I die a natural death: my heart just stops pumping all of a sudden. My son is a teenager. He does not have a mother or family support from my side or hers. Where does he go for his upbringing? He would be left absolutely lonely after I die. An orphan almost! Last night I cried a lot holding him to my chest; the funny part is he felt suffocated and advised me to consult a psychiatrist. I did not sleep the whole night. I saw him sleeping and snoring so beautifully. He has an angelic face, surely an angelic face Mr.Y!
I: What can you do about dieing? When it is time to go you go, not a bit before or after. But you worry me: if you move away from erotica you die before you are actually dead.
Mr.X: I know that for sure. But I just feel horribly pensive with the thought of how lonely my son is already and how much lonelier he can get after I die.
I: You want to die?
Mr.X: No Mr.Y, I want to live, at least for the next 10 years by which time my son would have settled in life.

I: So you will live Mr.X! Lock yourself up in a balloon up in the air away from this heat, dust, smoke and fungus and bacteria and virus! And, above all, women, you idiot!
Mr.X: Do I take my son as well in this balloon?
I: You can.
Mr.X: What kind of a future does he have by spending a life in a balloon?
I: Then get him married to the youngest daughter of your house-maid. This way you will leave behind his wife and in-laws to take care of him in your absence.
Mr.X: You have come up with a very good idea; I must compliment the efforts of your brains Mr.Y. Marriage is a good way to extend your social base. But the marriage of the kind that you propose would be illegal. I don’t want my son to take law in his hands.
I: Stuff it up your ass Mr.X; you have a nice one.

My kind words about Mr.X’s butts lifted his spirits; the shadows on his face were gone and he ordered for keema parantha with methi-chicken.

Later in the night after dinner instead of bidding farewell at the gate of the restaurant, which we did otherwise (having paid a small tip to the mustachioed pot-bellied doorman from North India for saluting us), we set out for an adjoining park famous for its carnivorous insects and ants of all variety; lepers, beggars, drug addicts and dealers taking shelter within its unfolding darkness and dull-faced-sullen-ugly whores. This was because Mr.X demanded of me to tell him a detective story.

So I told him a detective story: The Chief Minister of a State wakes up soggy one rainy cloudy grey morning to find his face in the mirror irrevocably changed - precisely having been replaced by the face of the Leader of the Opposition. He does not shave or clean his teeth and tongue or discharge his turds; instead he phones the Home Secretary right away in a spell of shock urging him to leave all business and set up a task force of the best police officers in the State with the only agenda of finding out the terrorist-miscreant who had committed such a murderous act: cutting up his original face (which was liked by women of all cultures) followed by replacing it with a hateful face (which means that this face was amputated in the first place); and most importantly, to go all out in search of his original face. The thought upper-most in the Chief Minister’s mind ran thus – Was somebody already wearing it (his face) and buying a Honda Civic or was it (already pale and ever paling now that it was drained off its blood supply) cooling off in the refrigerator of a homicidal lunatic?

As the story unfolded chapter by chapter, taking Mr.X’s wholehearted attention within its layers, a planet burst into flames in the sky. Needless to say, we could not reach the concluding chapter of the story; instead we had Swirl designer ice-cream stuffed with fruits and nuts.

Monologue

2010-06-22T16:30:00.000+05:30

1.
Last year I lost my mother. For a few moments her corpse had reclined on a steel stretcher on the portico of a modern hospital before it was loaded on to a flower decked hearse. She was surrounded by family, friends and relatives all crying hysterically. I had not cried until then. As I took a last look at her – she almost resembled a happily-sleeping fluffy doll – being drowned under a white ocean of flowers and garlands, tears welled up from nowhere blinding and diffusing my sight with the thunder of another thought and later replaced by a strange succession of images. Was she able to look through my flesh and blood, now that she was dead and could defy the universe of mechanics and quantum theories, to that vortex of nothingness and darkness that was essentially me? What happens when mothers realize that their sons are very different from the shadows they beam in social life? And then, all of a sudden, I saw my corpse illumined and stretched on a marble tiled floor looking into the soul of my son against an azure sky. He was looking at my swollen cold face with emotion and as the clouds emanating from my decaying stagnant body floated through the chill of air and entered his skull diving past his large beautiful eyes I could hear the complex tunes floating on the waves of a lonely sea: a sea that was eager to last a lifetime and show brilliant paths inside the cosmos to its earnest navigators. Was he relieved that I was no more there to pile on him with what I thought was right and wrong? Did he move away from me long back: in his adolescent years? Was he tired of and suffocated by me? Did he repent about following to tee what I asked of him to do in life and most of it that he did so wonderfully? Did he feel wasted and pent up in life that I felt many a time during my own lifetime? Did he sometimes wish to hit me or kill me or just that I was dead? Did he feel lonelier, after I was declared dead, like a sea with its lighthouse vanquished by its majestic shore?

2.
Two images terrify me constantly. I will share with you these images: a half-slice of a crimson moon staring at you through the grey veil of a swimming monsoon cloud suddenly sighted from a dilapidated terrace window (it takes my breath away making me feel somebody - the Surgeon of all Surgeons - is drilling through me and dissecting me inside out) and the view of the Bombay city from a distance on a monsoon night as your flight takes off westwards flying atop the Arabian Sea and then taking a swerve north-eastwards towards the city and the lights of emeralds, diamonds, pearls and neons blazing and some of them forming trajectories of sparkling photons visible through the flock of low flying dark clouds giving me an impression that the city is on the verge of a terrible exothermic explosion and the world will come to its end just in front of my eyes.

Bhopal, Bengal Politics, Al Gore, Way To Go

2010-06-08T17:17:00.000+05:30

As I listened to the verdict of a Bhopal Court in connection with the 1984 Bhopal Gas Tragedy on TV yesterday night, I felt a surge of rage rocking my body: all the more heightened by the pictures of Raghu Rai taken a day after the incident had happened converting Bhopal into a city of death. The verdict sounded so bizarre, absurd and out of proportion that I felt like doing something dramatic and equally insane to match its banality. Political democracy works on the fundamental premise of the existence of a nation-state, which is an aggregate of its institutions. When these institutions become subservient to corporate interests repeatedly by design one cannot help concluding that political democracy is a failed idea, rather an idea that was essentially designed as a long-term cloak / veil to shadow the true interests of its original thinkers: patrons of free-market economy who later on became ruthless colonialists and much later, imperialists. What do you do to a group of well-bred and educated people responsible for the crime of killing over 20,000 people; maiming 100,000 people; creating genetic disorder to many (to be transferred congenitally to generations to come), and caused irreversible damage to the environment and ecology of a city beyond repair; and further that invisible cluster of people who are responsible for letting the former group go scot-free? Does this question sound as if it was transported out of a revenge thriller? It makes me laugh to think that the original petitioners (activists out of victim communities) in the case were not even allowed to enter the Court yesterday and Section 144 was imposed around the Court premises in apprehension of reprisals from activists and victim groups! Most of them were seen crying after the verdict was out.

What a choice Bengalis have between the CPI(M) and the TMC! The CPI(M) has proven the sham of communism and socialism in India. They do have their own significance: primarily because of the economic movements that they championed in both the agricultural and industrial sectors (and also in organizing students and other kinds of labor) to keep a check on the injustices and atrocities of the semi-feudal and semi-capitalist regime in the country who had usurped political control immediately after the independence, and also, in keeping the plurality of discourse in learning, culture and arts. However, what needs to be remembered is they did all this before they came to power and once they were in power they did everything to abandon their original politics they espoused and associate themselves with all kinds of nerve centers and money bags that helped them to prolong, extend and intensify their power at the expense of the well-being of citizens they claimed to represent. They started doing everything the opposite of what they preached orally and in writing. All the institutions of administrations and of other kinds from top to bottom were converted into thought-ghettos. Opposition was crumbled by deceit: arrangement was reached very early on and at the highest level that the opposition should not tinker with the Left Front at the state level and in return they would not tinker with the Congress at the central level. In addition, state Congress leaders who were powerful in their local regions continued with their reign without any opposition from the Left Front. It turned out to be a wonderful arrangement. Factories and industries started closing one after the other without any protest. Barring the original land reforms that were initiated at the beginning years of coming to power, later on converted into fiefdoms of party machinery (more efficient replacement to the earlier zamindari system), the lowest and the most disposed peasantry continued to suffer. The tribals could never enter the mainstream. The Gorkhas and adivasis of North Bengal were snubbed down; they remained as alienated as they were. The jungle mafia went on the rampage unchecked. The real estate mafia works overtime in Bengal. According to me, Mamata Banerjee has only one thing to her credit: she did not succumb to the Left Front – Congress arrangement in Bengal. She has been steadfast and consistent in her opposition to the Left Front without any vision. Because she had no vision, people in Bengal never rallied around her. Then came the flashpoints: Nandigram and Singur. People’s frustrations had reached a peak. Today, they are, it seems, ready to take a plunge into an unknown darkness having suffered years of forced blindness.

Many columns and articles have been written recently centering on Al Gores’s marriage and divorce, detailing reasons of an ever-increasing phenomenon: middle-age and beyond middle-age divorces in urban communities. Why do marriages break after 20 or 30 years of conjugal life? One of the reasons that I did not find listed in these columns and articles is: the idea of love at an enhanced age takes on a different meaning and intensity, and its looming possibility because modern urban living is bringing a lot many middle-age and beyond middle-age men and women in close contact with other men and women of varied groups, communities and identities thereby increasing the chances of an amorous relationship between them. Over the years of marriage one discovers many futilities of family life hidden within the layers of togetherness; dreams break but nobody discusses these things. You fall in love; you marry; you build a home and acquire wealth and plan for insurance, investments and inheritance; you produce babies. Such is the common trajectory made up of material dreams. Middle-age or beyond middle-age love is usually bereft of such a well recognized trajectory. It is mostly dreamless and lived / experienced for the present because of which it is powerful and has the potential of dashing all your assumptions.

I am presently reading Upamanyu Chatterjee’s Way To Go. I am enjoying every bit of the book. I will end today’s post with a line from this book: From wherever you are, Ma, you are going to teach me, aren’t you, and knock into my head till it clamps there, that death too is a vanity?

Underground

2010-06-01T13:58:00.000+05:30

1.

What was happening to Africa, Latin America and a few Asian countries in the last century is happening today in Europe: Greece, Portugal, Ireland and Spain. These countries have unsustainable levels of debt. Economic globalization is consolidating large scale private debt which is being consequentially passed onto governments for bailout thereby affecting the liquidity and in certain cases validity and sovereignty of national governments. Economic globalization is a melting pot where weaker economies have been / are being / will be washed out by the hurricane of most powerful economies. Capitalism (where selling and buying is at the core of existence and forms the aim of all aspirations) ideally thrives on an expenditure driven revenue model. To boost expenditure taxes are kept low and debts are made available at attractive terms. This drives the debt market to an extent when you invariably end up with a large gap between what you lend and what you take as security against what you lend. Gradually, comes a stage when debt defaulting reaches a pinnacle affecting the liquidity of the lenders. The lenders are essentially banks and financial institutions. The process of lending / borrowing is three tiered: individual, institutional and national. Banks being interconnected in an economically globalized world, it results in a cascading chain reaction affecting many of them to get wiped out like a pack of cards crumbling to a wind. This has severe political and social consequences, which we are witnessing globally at the present moment.

Capitalism, imperialism and economic globalization have irrevocably altered the relation between men: communities, nations and races; between men and nature most destructively, fuelled by greed, enterprise and innovation of the human species, and almost brought us close to extinction. Yet, no political experiment: socialism and communism including, have been successful in replacing or reversing this process. Why? We know for sure that altruism, philanthropy and charity cannot heal the evils already caused. How do we stop large corporations disregard ecological concerns connected with: land, water, air, forests, flora and fauna, animals and communities living outside the glare of modernity? How do we stop powerful countries from going to war and amass large military and nuclear arsenal? How do we stop formation of surrogate colonies: economic, political and cultural? Who will give food, healthcare and justice to the weak, dispossessed and the underprivileged? Who will reverse large hordes of hapless unemployed youth falling prey to the lure of being a militant or a mercenary?

Capitalism has given us wonderful institutions of knowledge, legislation, judiciary, and regulation and of many other kinds that have helped us to know about us and the universe including appreciating its most ambivalent aspects but it has also wrapped us up in a veil of aspiration to live immortally thereby rendering us ineffective to act. Capitalism which makes great capital out of individual privacy is its greatest destroyer. It loves its specific set of institutions to keep a round-the-clock vigil on its citizenry.

I believe there is something fundamental in human consciousness that arouses it to self-destruction which is why capitalism in spite of its worst moments of crisis has survived to lead us to the impending extinction of human race.
2.
In the last few weeks I have read 5 books: 3 by Paul Auster – The New York Trilogy; Invisible and The Inner Life of Martin Frost; Underground by Haruki Murakami and Hotel Iris by Yoko Ogawa. I realized to my surprise that I have traveled from far West to far East in a very short span of time gaining interesting insight.

The New York Trilogy is a compilation of 3 novels – City of Glass, Ghosts and Locked Room. These are 3 brilliant variations on the classic detective story in the back drop of New York emerging to be a strange, compelling landscape in which identities merge or fade and questions serve only to further obscure the truth.

Martin Frost is a screenplay on which Paul Auster later directed and co-produced a film by the same name. This is a study of solitude, creative imagination being translated to a work of art and the conflict arising out of the surreal and real. It is contrived at places. However, the character – Fortunato – who gives us comic relief is wonderfully created. I have not seen the film and as such, am unable to comment on how it was translated on celluloid. This book contains an interview of Paul Auster (in the beginning of the book) with Celine Curol (Canadian novelist, essayist and journalist) done on 22 August 2006 on the making of the film. Somewhere during the interview he lays stress on stories being told in various forms including narrative poems. I found it supportive of a medium I seem to advocate quite often.

Invisible is a brilliant novel narrated by 3 different people. The story traces from 1967 to 2007: from Morningside Heights to the left bank of Paris to a remote island in the Caribbean. 2 things struck me in the novel like lightning: i) Adam Walker’s incestuous relationship with his elder sister and its graphic listing by Adam Walker and denied by his sister 40 years later, and ii) Rudolf Born’s ruthless and manipulative streak. The eternal cloud of human consciousness marvelously evolves through the maze of events arising out of the actions of each and every principal character in this novel.

Hotel Iris sends chills down the spine at places. A young girl named Mari (aged 17 and works in her ancestral hotel as a front-office assistant cum cook cum housekeeper) in a suburban coastal town of Japan falls for a man 50 years senior to her. He lives alone on an island and is a translator by profession. He is one kind of a man in the town and quite a different person while on the island. He inflicts pleasure and pain on the girl in abandon. Mari worships him and is devoted to him and even submits to his violence during sex pleasurably. Thereafter appears the nephew of the translator who is a tongueless painter. Mari falls for him too and they make love. The translator being suspicious of her interactions with his nephew catches her during an interrogation on the island. The novel ends abruptly.

Underground is a poignant witness tale (intriguingly dispassionate to the core) on the 20 March 1995 sarin gas attack in the Tokyo subway. It is broadly divided into 2 parts: i) accounts of victims, and ii) accounts of people who were close to the perpetrators. In the Preface to Part 1 Murakami ends with the lines: You get up at the normal time, wash, dress, breakfast, and head for the subway station. You board the train, crowded as usual. Nothing out of the ordinary. It promises to be a run-of-the-mill day. Until five men indisguise poke at the floor of the carriage with the sharpened tips of their umbrellas, puncturing some plastic bags filled with a strange liquid … At the end of Part 1 in an essay Murakami writes: Haven’t you offered some part of your Self to someone (or something), and taken on the “narrative” in return? Haven’t we entrusted some part of our personality to some greater System or Order? And if so, has not the System at some stage demanded of us some kind of “insanity”? Is the narrative you now possess really and truly your own? Are your dreams really your own dreams? Might not they be someone else’s visions that could sooner or later turn into nightmares? In the Afterword Murakami brilliantly brings out one of the central conflicts of modern life: The question was asked over and over again, “How could such elite, highly educated people believe in such a ridiculous, dangerous new religion?” Certainly it’s true that the Aum leadership was composed of elite people with distinguished academic credentials, so it’s little wonder that everyone was shocked to discover this. The fact that such upwardly-mobile people easily rejected the positions in society that were promised them and ran off to join a new religion is a serious indication, many have said, that there is a fatal defect in the Japanese education system. However, as I went through the process of interviewing these Aum members and former members, one thing I felt quite strongly was that it wasn’t in spite of being part of the elite that they went in that direction, but precisely because they were part of the elite.
3.
We have to do Underground in India on: the Sikh riots in Delhi; demolition of the Babri Masjid; the Hindu-Muslim riots in Gujarat post-Godhra; the violence in Nandigram and Singur in connection with farmlands being snatched away by governments for industries; the conflict between the tribals, the Maoists and the security forces in the backdrop of forests and mines; the Narmada Bachao Andolan – to be able to grasp ‘what is modern India’ in full measure.

Death Sentence and others

2010-05-08T14:04:00.000+05:30

1.

I am puzzled by the boisterous and brazen display of euphoria by sections of the Indian public – mostly, the aspirational middle class – at the death sentencing of a foot soldier of terrorism, who in my comprehension is a terribly rudderless, impoverished, destructive and an indoctrinated fellow (that he is a criminal and a mass murderer by the law books is not in question). The genesis of such hysteria has something to do with the way 26/11 was televised on national television. English educated anchors from elite institutions – national and international - otherwise proponents of liberal democracy in chat room discussions went ballistic and jingoistic losing almost all sense of objective reporting. They were dishonest to their profession: not by default of course but by design. TV caters to the aspirational and upwardly mobile middle class. And, this class generally produces top-notch servants engaged in sincere lobbying work for the hyper-rich: their interests and policies. As such, TV must reflect what they do, aspire to do and mostly, create a perfect cultural network that would validate such interests and policies. War and security are big-time business. Sometime after the 2nd World War the CIA invested huge sums of money in insurgency operations in various countries to suit to their foreign policy strategies. This created an invisible but massive transnational industry of terrorism and caused the rebirth of a very different kind of political Islam. This model was later replicated by many countries. The investments made in Pakistan have been colossal. Terrorism, like all State militaries, recruits its foot soldiers from the most impoverished and decimated families. Terrorism justifies war against terrorism and creates two kinds of businesses directly: for the military contractors and the construction contractors (once, landscapes and waterscapes are destroyed in wars). International funding agencies pitch in with development funds for such reconstruction. At a macro-scale it is a joint venture of various agencies: military contractors, construction contractors, State militaries, terrorist organizations, international funding agencies and political institutions (they help in rallying public opinion and mobilizing support of citizenry so that there is least public hostility to this joint venture). In this interconnected matrix one is inseparable from the other. The impoverished lot supplies foot soldiers on a sustained basis because for them extinction is an on-going reality, and tragically, it is the impoverished lot who suffer the most in terrorist outbreaks. One may be happy in granting a death sentence to one of the lowest-rung faces of terrorism but one must not forget that this is what the brains of terrorism also want because there are innumerable such faces in the queue to replicate one long lost face. Would it not have been more daunting to try to take a hard path to unravel with honesty - the machinations of how terror networks function and the details of their brains and nerve centers - through this foot soldier? But quite clearly the State is not interested in doing that. The State has vested interests in not letting out such truth out in the open. Because that might prove a long held conjecture that: The State’s security agencies representing the State (this is true for almost all States) and the terrorist organizations are two mouths at opposite ends of the same dragon. TV pitches in with the right dose of emotional flapping while reporting a heinous terrorist attack so that we are mediated with frenzied yearnings for retributive death of its foot soldiers, quite easily forgetting that with the death of each foot soldier dies material evidence of the nexus between big players in the background.

2.
Aparajita and Pratidwandi – both films by Satyajit Ray – are two of my most favorite films. I am generously exposed to world cinema. I have watched these two films innumerable times; I have seen many other classics multiple number of times. In the last five years these two films have communicated to me a few things which went unnoticed during my younger days. Aparajita now raises an eternal question in my soul: How ethical and wholesome is your search for personal education, enlightenment and prosperity having left (almost abandoned) your mother – alone, sick and impoverished – in the decaying darkness of a dwindling village home? Similar questions were raised by Tolstoy in Anna Karenina through Levin in its concluding chapters. I think this question can help us look at modernity in its most truthful image. The modern world has sadly even altered the ferocious (otherwise natural) love and bonding between siblings. Pratidwandi reflects a strange love between an elder brother and his younger sister in a lower middle class Bengali (refugee) home, and that is not the main story of the film (mind you). It is a mix of protective brotherly love, anxious paternal love and combative love that exists between lovers. The elder brother is silently (not overtly) in search of a species of birds; his sister is in deep love with its voice having listened to its crooning and whistles (together with his elder brother) during a childhood rendezvous. A year back I had seen this film with my son. He foxed me with an embarrassing question: Do you love your sister this much?

3.
A friend of my son announced a few days back: Kaku, we are likely to be flooded with C grade Universities from the west; thanks to the new Education Bill! What will happen to our Universities like … (he named many including the one from where my sister has done her Doctorate and I have graduated), institutions built on years of hard work, sincerity and imagination? I did not respond. I only realized once again: How lopsided is this battle between the East and the West! How much the East colludes with the West in self-annihilation!

4.
I will start writing a drama very soon: a crime thriller with a mother and a daughter relationship at its core!

Dantewara; Sania-Shoaib-Ayesha; IPL & Tiger Woods

2010-04-16T17:04:00.002+05:30

In the recent past, I was closely following news reports in connection with the events as mentioned below:

1. The Dantewara conflict resulting in the death of approximately 80 security personnel at the hands of local Maoist militia / insurgents.
2. The Sania Mirza – Shoaib Malik – Ayesha Siddiqui marriage and divorce saga.
3. The bidding and the finalization of the Pune and the Kochi IPL franchisees at astronomical sums.
4. The return of Tiger Woods.

These incidents were reported in the print and the electronic media almost round the clock with enormous heat, hype and passion. I was sucked into its tantalizing vortex of reportage and opinions without any realistic resistance.

Once the immediacy of the news had settled in, I got some time to reflect. The issues that came to my mind are:

The classical divide between the rich (the powerful who run the state) and the poor (the disenfranchised) has converted itself into a full scale war in the darkness of the jungles, low lying mountains and plateaus of India. The war is between greed on one side and human survival on the other. The upwardly mobile class hangs onto the political idea of democracy and nationalism propagated by the rich (but not practiced). The English speaking media is a complex matrix of organizations that works to the interests of large corporations (including compradors) and is run and fuelled by the most capable and suave members of this upwardly mobile community. The mainstream vernacular media is not free of vested interests; it operates as the branch offices of the mainstream English speaking media. The variance in styling of similar content – more aggressive, insensitive, unrefined and sensationalizing – is worth noticing. The poor has very little voice in the institutions of the state as well as the media. Vast expanse of land is being snatched away by large corporations in the name of development through mining and setting up of colossal industrial units resulting in displacement of millions of people. The total wealth generated by such industrial enterprise is shared between the promoters and the state most disproportionately in the approximate ratio of 90:10 (in the form of revenue received through taxes and royalty). Only 3 to 4% of the wealth accrued to the promoters cascade downwards. The state, as such, who is assigned with the duty of protecting its citizenry by statute, works in joint venture with the promoters of these large corporations to protect their interests by validating their objectives, aims, and methods to achieve such objectives and aims in the names of development and growth. The fact is systemic impoverishment, malnourishment and neglect have combined together to form such an intense envelope of darkness in the mineral and timber rich districts of India that it is beyond imagination today to work out a roadmap for reconciliation between the 2 sides. Do we have any elected representative who has the imagination to suggest a workable methodology to the tribals to continue with their movement non-violently in an atmosphere where private armies and state agencies in cohort run the writ or to halt the locomotion of these armies and agencies? What does a tribal want? First: she does not want to give away her land (the track record of rehabilitation in India is abjectly poor); second: she wants means of livelihood so that she is able to earn food, shelter and clothing for her and her family; third: she aspires to get access to healthcare, water and education to be able to lead a dignified life. But when you are driven away from your own land against your wish you become a hapless migrant. Your chances of survival become minimal. So the tribal today is involved in a bloody battle not to get thrown away from her own land. How does one do it non-violently in the face of these powerful armies and agencies? The large corporations also invest huge sums of money in getting parliamentarians elected so that legislations are made in their favor. Is there any parliamentarian to take up the case based on merits and objective analysis and reasoning and whose imagination is not rooted to the wants and desires of the promoters of large corporations? I feel utterly sorry for the foot soldiers of the state (and the large corporations it sets out to protect) who inundate the jungles, kill tribals and die at their hands; they essentially prowl under-prepared and of course, without knowing the implicit objectives, and have been unleashed on the people most dangerously by their masters. The irony is: People who mask their true interests in the garb of circuitous discussions on democracy, nationalism, and denouncing the use of violence (when it comes to common men having taken up arms against the state in desperation) are neither aware of the scale of hunger and desperation that is fuelling this war nor are they sensitive and sincere to their foot soldiers (on whose account they shed tears in TV studios) who have been (literally) thrown into the battlefields without adequate food, shelter, water, mosquito repellents, arms and ammunitions, and above all, a clear-cut strategy. I have another question to ask: Will violence be in the long term interest of the tribals? I think, no. Violence will help them to retaliate and protect themselves in the short term, but it will end up undermining the political battle against the dictatorship of the rich (landlords and large corporations put together) embedded in the idea of democracy as practiced in India. Secondly, violent politics is most likely to be criminalized in the long run. Bhagat Singh’s strategic use of violence was political (as it was being played with an audience around it) and not prophylactic; Gandhi’s strategic use of non-violence was political too and it arose from within the politics of the trusteeship of the rich and the leisured class; violence used by the tribals is retaliatory and prophylactic and is essentially devoid of politics. How does one bring the human civilization back to the idea that its survival rests in the ecological survival of all communities including every constituent of the biosphere? For this we have to move away from industrial economics and the idea of modernity that multiplies consumption and brings every ambit of our existence under commercial laws; go back to our lands and sources of water to live in farming communities without the polluted idea of adding too much to nature in our lifespan in the name of wealth generation.
How would you react if a non-celebrity status Indian woman was to fall in love with a Pakistani man or vice versa? What kind of a man marries on phone? What kind of a sports-star marries a woman without seeing her face? What kind of a woman keeps her clothes (dipped in her man’s fluids) unwashed and stacked securely for years? What kind of a woman gets engaged to her childhood sweetheart (publicly and pompously); breaks off her engagement in a few months time (again publicly and pompously); and then after a short break announces her marriage to another man [well, a falling sports icon this time from another country but settled in a different country] (once again publicly and pompously)?
Have you read the Koran? Polygamy as described in the Koran has a background context to it of the gory holy-war; it is very different from institutionalized polygamy as enshrined in the Muslim Personal Laws. Divorce by utterance (even in sense) does not find approval in the Koran. However, these are the 2 issues on which the Koran is denigrated by its religious opponents, very wrongly and ignorantly according to me.
IPL is plush with funds. Where is this money coming from; who are the real investors? Who is earning, and how much? IPL is the crucible for showcasing of advertisements, and creating an engine for selling and pumping of multifarious products and services in the marketplace. As such, there was a need to showcase it as a huge carnival, bonanza and razzmatazz, where stars from the movie industry work as front men for investors: it is a cocktail of money, movies and a popular sport where the needs of the sportsmen fared last. Forget Kochi and Pune; Kings X1 Punjab (which is likely to come last in IPL 3) is valued now at Rs. 1000 crores: 3 to 4 times more than that of what it was bought at 3 years back. Where do you get such astronomical returns for underperformance? Which means, price of a team in IPL is not proportional to its performance; well, this contradicts the fundamental principle of free market economics! UP, Uttarakhand, MP, Chattisgarh, Bihar, Jharkhand, West Bengal and the whole of North East has 1 team: Kolkata Knight Riders. Maharashtra has 2 teams; all the 4 Southern states have 1 team each; the North has 3 teams. What does this show? IPL is consolidating and underlining the already existing biases in India: that between regions; classes; and, privileges.
Tiger Woods is an exceptional sportsman: his career built on passion and hard work. Unfortunately, he was made into a pseudo-cultural icon once again by the biggest multi-national corporations by fabricating (in many cases suitably exaggerating) stories around him: rags to riches; racial discrimination; doting father; doting husband; and, his political and religious correctness. The agenda was simple: Such conformist guys sell products and services much better than brigands like, Muhammad Ali and George Best. Once, Tiger Woods’ personal life was exposed to the hilt (I sympathize with him), the same corporations lost no time in abandoning him. Meanwhile, the bosses found out one thing: The investments made on Tiger Woods have been astronomical and he cannot go scot-free. So, they will take him back once again, when the stories of his sexual transgressions fade from public memory (on which the media at the behest of these corporations has already started working). I think in the next 3 to 6 months time you will find the Tiger is back on the billboards. Conservatism in politics, religious beliefs, and cultural positioning works to the advantage of commercial corporations.

Kindly do not think I am a secularist or a leftist; I am neither of these. But I am very unhappy at: the way consumption, greed, commercialization, and justification for going to war and violence unleashed on the powerless by the powerful have taken over each and every existential microcosm of our life. I am also deeply saddened by the decimation of countries like Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and many others in Africa on one pretext or the other.

Is there a way to move forward or have we been irrevocably entangled in a downward helix of self-annihilation of the human race?

Yesterday I saw a wonderful film: Paul Greengrass’s Green Zone – US Army on their deceitful trail to find WMDs in Iraq and they ended up finding none!!!

Some Recent Thoughts

2010-04-01T16:05:00.000+05:30

1.

In Bharatpur bird sanctuary I came to know of two things. One, there is a specific variety of birds that pick on the teeth of tigers. A tiger having had a dense meal sits leisurely, possibly drooling, with its teeth open to the sky. These birds come and sit on the tiger’s mouth and feed on the tiny morsels of meat stuck between the spaces of its teeth. So, this results in two things: the cleaning of the tiger’s teeth and feeding of the hungry bird. Second, woodpeckers peck on tree stems in search of food like ants and insects of variety, resulting in creation of warm labyrinths, which are then enjoyed as homes by parakeets.

Nature has devised wonderful complimentary patterns of survival that hints at the fundamental grammar of melody and ethic.

2.
If rape (in the sexual context) is defined as sexual assault and act of hostile intercourse against the wishes of another person, how then can rape be gender specific? But the problem is: it is hardly defined in a gender neutral manner! It is always meant to be an act of sexual aggression by men on women. Rights activists argue that a man can never be raped; at the most he can be sexually harassed. What about men being sodomized by men and transvestites, and transvestites and eunuchs by men? Because men have disproportionate power in the realm of the real world compared to what women have, hence acts of all kinds of aggression (including rape) on women by men will of course outnumber similar acts on men by women. Further, the rape of a man is likely to be least reported in the present context because involving in a sexual act is seen to be macho behavior (and, men do not enjoy being projected un-macho because that’s just so un-cool!) and as such, shying away from sexual activity (where opportunity permits) is seen to be cloaking oneself ungainfully with feminine traits. I have listened to many stories where the men had to be involved unwillingly in sexual intercourse with their wives (yes wives!) to demonstrate: their interest in marriage and their partners, and their ability to perform; they were threatened by their powerful wives (on account of having more access to wealth and accompanying beauty in most of these cases) that otherwise they would face desertion and public humiliation of the worst kind. In such cases, these men have reported to have felt the very act of getting aroused excruciatingly tormenting. This is not rape but not very different from rape either.

Although, I do agree that men cannot be physically or emotionally bruised or violated or put to risk to the extent a woman can be in an act of rape.

While rape laws should be written considering the existential realities arising out of the enormously disproportionate gap in power between men and women in every sector of our society, however, there is every reason to alter the gender specificity of the act of rape in its literal meaning: just because it is not true.

3.
Children rob you of your basic freedom to rebel. In this context children are seen to be obfuscation or an impediment to ones individuality whether they are born to a plan or by default. I know of innumerable incidents where parents have abandoned their children both under impoverished as well as privileged conditions for multifarious reasons. There are situations akin to abandonment even in cases where the parent might not have left the family physically. I must add: I have also met parents who have gone out of families due to discord with their partners, and yet have been very dutiful to and protective of their children.

I have often wondered about the possible incentives in abandoning your children (although considering respectfully that in all the cases it must have been a very painful experience for the parent). There is of course the life of Buddha in search of truth having abandoned his family and kingdom. It is complicated but the life of Buddha (specifically his act of abandonment) can be viewed in many ways. Parents, who abandon, in most of the cases, alter their memory to find an underlying justification to abandon to unburden the weight of guilt that sits on their soul like a monster. The souls of children get mauled in the process of abandonment for they do not understand and their vulnerability, both emotional and physical, alters their understanding of life and existence.

There is a violent world prowling around us.

If we have children it is ethically incumbent on us to protect them from the shadows of this ever-increasing violence, and try to help them grow as fine individuals.

4.
There is so much talk all around about the reforms in the modern education system. But nobody in power seems to be talking about reducing the burden: both in terms of the number of subjects and the constituent syllabus, especially up to high school. Education is no longer contemplative and is not aimed towards sharpening our faculties to understand and realize. Education must help us to observe the universe and our lives with sensitivity and humor, and must help us to think and question. But that is not the aim of the education industry and mafia for sure! I want to write about this in greater detail sometime later. To end may I say: The examinations per se are not bad but the format is?

Psalm 23

2010-03-05T15:24:00.001+05:30

Human soul is a cloud of confusion and contradictions. There is no straight-cut formula, approach or ideology that will help us decipher it. The randomness of the human soul and consciousness is the biggest challenge to the human civilization.

Art, literature and entrepreneurship over the years have thrown immense light on the strange workings of the human soul and consciousness. What can you conclude having read the Anna Karenina or the countless theological and literary interpretations of the Feast of Sacrifice (Binding of Isaac or Binding of Ishmael) or the enigmatic questions of life and death in the Upanishads or Meursault’s journey in the Outsider or Amal’s fall into the silence of death in the Dakghar or having traveled through the majestic trappings of the Walt Disney’s empire? We can simply conclude: It is nearly impossible to conclude.

There is a rational engine embedded in our soul and consciousness that helps us to understand the universe and our existence, and take decisions for ourselves in order to survive according to our aspirations and circumstances. At the same time, there rests an amorphous wave in the unseen quarters of our soul and consciousness that makes us realize that in each phenomenon that we encounter or know of, there are other traits that travel through the discovered laws, repetitions and patterns like transversals of sudden lightning, which are not easily subject to reasoned analysis.

Recently I sensed a conflict in my own soul: While in real life I am not given to mysticism or spirituality (in fact, I shun them and in public forums argue against them being aware of the havoc such things create on gullible people), there lies a deep longing within to surrender and submit to an ‘enlightened soul’. If taken forward, this could extend to the point of giving up my Self to this ‘enlightened soul’ (could be a theological or political or corporate ideologue); this would as a corollary relieve me of the critical stresses that modern life generates because of its omnipotent commercialization and hyper-consumption and end up reducing me to a vegetable where I am no longer required to take any decisions about myself but follow a path that is laid out for me.

In a way, the conflicting strains are between the rigors of decisive action and the longing to be a renunciate.

The challenge is: How to stay away from dogma in participating in both the experiences – the path of natural science and the tunnel of metaphysics; it is also important to know that a complete path is one that can contain both the experiences.

Somebody who does not know me well asked me a few days back: What do I read when I am despairing? Actually, nothing came to my mind, so I ended up saying: Well, sometimes I read the Psalm 23. The questioner practically frowned at me; he said: And, your friends say that you are an atheist!

I kept quiet not knowing what to reply.

The Psalm 23 is given below; you may read it if you wish to.

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He makes me to lie down in green pastures; He leads me beside the still waters.
He restores my soul; He leads me in the paths of righteousness For His name’s sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death; I will fear no evil; For You are with me; Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me.
You prepare a table before me in presence of my enemies; You anoint my head with oil; My cup runs over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me All the days of my life; And I will dwell in the house of the Lord Forever.

Chasing

2010-02-12T15:35:00.002+05:30

(A long story-poem written in 3 chapters of free verse)
1.

The true art is in the art of chasing not ideas or dreams,
But people who interest you all of a sudden at street corners,
At railway stations, at ice cream parlors, at grocery shops, at libraries,
And graveyards, inside hospital lobbies, so on and so forth.
What draws you closer to them,
Could be the strains of mist in their eyes,
The waves on their hair,
The incongruent stains of food on their shirts,
Or, even the dogged hunch of their backs.
2.
I have mastered this art over the years.
A few years back on a sunny winter afternoon,
I was eating a chicken cutlet at a street joint near Shyambazar crossing.
These are times when I become an obsessively self possessed man,
Almost severed from the rest of the world;
The pleasures of eating street food are such!
When I was devouring the last morsel of this giant cutlet,
Deeply immersed in a happy reverie,
I caught the sight of a hapless man (from the edge of my eyes),
Standing a few yards away from me,
Eating something that looked like a well done fish fry,
Inanely gaping elsewhere at a spiraling vortex of darkness unfolding,
Non-existent to normal eyes like mine.
What struck me was his spiritual distance from the delicacy that he was eating!
Having chased this man through the length and the breadth of the city,
Crossing its densely populated and abandoned avenues,
Streets and labyrinths during days and nights, across seasons and storms,
Rising buildings and heaps of debris,
Following him inside shops, restaurants, malls and cinema halls,
The strange scents of my pursuit still linger in my mind.
On foot, on bus, on local train and underground train,
On boat and on rickshaw and auto-rickshaw,
The story of this man was revealed to me,
As riddles start unlocking in dreams ending with more complex riddles to solve.

The story goes like this:
The man belonged to a family of grocers in the laid-back town of Malda,
He had inherited a decent store in the downtown supermarket,
He had a well cut-out life like his other two brothers,
Who had inherited similar stores like him in the city markets.
He obviously had other plans,
He wanted to build a factory for kites.
His understanding of aerodynamics was phenomenal,
In school, he had become a legend as a kite-maker and a kite-flyer.
One evening while returning from his secret workshop where,
He experimented with kites of different shapes and sizes,
He saw a lovely woman with radiant skin and a wondrous face,
In a lane that was barely illuminated by the lights of advertisement boards,
Displaying soaps, iodized salt and digital watches.
As soon as he saw this woman embedded in a world of her own,
Whom he thought to be a ball of magical light,
He knew his life was soon to meet a decisive change.
He followed this woman at a safe distance,
She taught English at the Evergreen Coaching Class.
The next few days he locked himself up in a room,
Meticulously planning how to make a move at her.
Ten days later, the face of this woman still playing on his mind,
He sat in the cash-counter of his grocery shop,
Reluctant, absent-minded, unsure and unaware of a concrete plan,
When this woman walked into his shop to buy three bars of Liril.
You can imagine the crescendo of his happy heart beating,
Facing this woman from such a close distance.
He took charge of the transaction with shivering legs,
The two things that made our man go crazy with longing,
Were the softness of this woman’s honey colored skin,
And the luminescence of her eyes.
After she paid the cash and took the bars of soap,
She spent a few seconds looking at the other things behind the cash-counter:
Deodorants, shampoos, multiple grain biscuits, basmati rice packs,
Colorful pouches of pepper and spices and likewise,
Then she turned back and made a move to exit the store.
The man said something almost inaudible and quivering to her:
Do you like kites?
She looked at the man, pleasant clouds swimming in her eyes
She replied to him in English: Are you telling me something?
Yes, I’m saying: Do you like kites?
Of course, I like kites and my brother likes them even more!
The man brought out two colossal kites with frills and laces:
One done in red and black in the shape of the face of a monster,
And the other a green and blue one in the shape of a mango.
Giving her these kites ceremoniously, hiding his embarrassment he said:
These kites come free with three bars of Liril from the store owner,
And these are designed by me.
The happiness the woman felt at this grand gesture is difficult to describe;
Once she had taken the kites with her,
She looked at him more closely (although hiding her scrutiny intelligently);
She was overwhelmed by her mounting desire.
The next two years were years of sunshine,
Devoted to a pair of wild lovers who met,
In the mornings and nights unseen to society,
In the kite-maker’s workshop to pour,
The warmth of their longing in each others bodies and souls,
Everyday without a break.
What struck the man about this woman was:
She loved her body to the point of being shamelessly selfish,
And openly enjoyed the act of making love to him,
Demanding all the manipulations of pleasure,
Which he thought were tricks of fallen women and whores.
This unnerved him for some time;
Later he came to terms with it concluding,
That all her acts were endeavors to heighten his pleasure;
These were true signs of sacrifice that a woman in love could do for her man.
Needless to say: He was unconvinced by his own logic,
He remained constantly smitten by bouts of angry jealousy,
Emanating from his belief that she had enjoyed innumerable men before she met him.
The woman loved his acts of jealousy,
And did nothing substantially to douse his fire.
A few facts here:
This woman came from an English educated Brahmin family,
The man came from a family of traders with very little formal education,
And he was seven years younger to her.
These became terrible obfuscations to a proposal of marriage from either side,
She was married off all of a sudden to a doctor in Calcutta in the third year.
A friend of this man, who was invited to the marriage,
Had been going up and down the town circulating news like:
The bridegroom is a FRCP from Edinburgh,
Tall and good-looking, almost dashing like an actor in a Hollywood movie,
And the couple looked shrouded in a thick blanket of bliss and happiness,
Whenever they were together.
Our man was gradually destroyed,
Almost decimated in the next three years,
With the acuteness of love pains which struck every organ of his body,
Most importantly, his brain,
Falling deeper in a ravenous depthless pit each day.
One fine morning he decided to make a journey to the city of Calcutta,
(Which had become Kolkata by this time) and come face-to-face,
With this woman and talk to her for the last time;
For he had three questions to ask.
He was sure this was the only way to heal his oozing wounds;
The questions were idiotic and sentimental to say the least:
Were you happy with me?
Are you happy now?
Why did you break my heart?
The point is: The woman was happy in her marital life!
Why did she do what she did:
This question of course flamed in my mind.
It’s difficult to answer this,
I found no clues to it but I’ve an answer:
The man was inconsequential to her in the real sense,
She wanted a settled and a secure life for herself,
But before she could attain it she secretly wished to avenge,
Her disciplinarian and righteous upbringing,
By breaking free for a few intervening years,
And taste the unfettered shadows of life that true love transports with it.
This man that I chased was far from getting healed,
Observing the happiness of a warm home,
Where his lover was the queen surrounded by her children and husband,
The situation had ignited a dark passion in the deep quarters of his soul.
One winter morning swimming gaily in the river Hooghly,
He must have planned to shoot her on a new moon night,
For it was after this bath that,
His actions of accessing the gun market had become most decisive.
I was a witness to the murder,
I was spellbound by his commitment to the act.
After killing her and seeing her fall limply on the marble floor of her bedroom,
In front of a teak-wood paneled florally carved box,
He laughed for the first time since I had seen him on that sunny winter afternoon.
He felt relieved, ready to be taken,
His body faintly lit by the light of celestial bodies in an otherwise dark night.
3.
I chase women too,
I had started chasing my wife (well, she was not my wife then),
By the side of a dry fruit store in a shopping mall on a misty spring evening.
What had struck me was the deep melancholy,
Rising from her eyes like steam and the beauty of her softness.
She told me once which makes me worry quite a lot:
I must wear some cosmetics darling at least to show to the others,
That I’m happy with you.
I argued against cosmetics in social forums quite successfully;
But I was getting defeated hands down by the logic that cosmetics
Could beam somebody’s inner happiness as if it had no light of its own.
We fought over this so hard that we ended up making love.
There are nights when my wife lives with her mother,
And I am left all alone in the house to fend for myself,
I get up in the nights sleeplessly and wonder through the house,
With lovelorn thoughts of her hovering dangerously in my mind.
This is when I go to her wardrobe and light it up,
As my sight travels over her perfumes, lavender, moisturizers,
Creams, skin foundations, talcum, nail-polishes,
And lip-smacks in the finest bottles of glass and metal,
Adorning the trays and empty spaces of fine cut wood,
I can sense the loneliness that I feel without her,
And the aching feeling of how much I want to make her mine.
My room gets flooded with a spray of smoke,
And I can see a simmering image of her in the mirror,
From where she looks at me with pure desire.

The Tower

2010-02-10T12:04:00.003+05:30

(A long story-poem written in 6 chapters of free verse)
1.

The tower where we live is a tall and a lonely tower,
Standing outside the limits of the city.
It reaches into the white tufts of clouds
From a huge expanse of land once used for potato farming.
This tower among other towers has a name,
It is popular by its name: Dream Tower.
Sometimes I wonder about the dreams of this Dream Tower,
Dreams of its architect, dreams of the masons who worked on it,
Dreams of the seller and of the buyers of its apartments,
And of the mafia which craftily squeezed the land out of wide eyed farmers.
The tower stands erect like the timeless portal of an arrogant crown.
As I walk up its spinal stairwell at nights,
Pondering over this multitude of dreams, I know,
These are dreams which still linger in its labyrinths like ghosts.
2.
There are times when I stand at the window of my apartment,
Looking at the city where I was born.
Searching for symbols and patterns that I know exist,
Beneath layers of rising vapor in the air of this city.
The smog invariably clouds my vision.
Sometimes I catch a glimpse of familiar bridges and a few monuments.
Mostly I look at the airplanes taking off and landing incessantly,
And the cars that seem to glide on the highway that dives past the distant tower.
The farmlands and wetlands around the tower look plundered and ravaged,
Destroyed by the monstrous man made construction machinery,
Giving way to spectacular buildings, deluxe hotels and shopping malls.
I tell a lot of people (not caring to hide the strain of pride in my tone):
I live away from the city, amidst greenery and water bodies and clouds.
I know this is a lie; yet I prefer saying it,
It makes my acquisition look like a prize possession.
Soon the ever swelling concrete jungle will engulf everything;
The nooks and corners, the parks and shady grounds by the lakesides,
Where I chased solitary beautiful girls during winter picnics long time ago.
3.
I have a friend who is a film critic – progressive, well read,
And talkative on all the matters on earth;
I hope you understand what I mean.
This guy after eating a sumptuous meal at my place summed it up:
Sandy, this property makes you look like a man!
Men are no longer known for their chivalry,
Or, by the charming ways they treat their women.
Rather, when we talk of men coming back nowadays,
They are actually referring to sedans resembling angry war planes.
My friend’s words made me wistful for some time, and ponder:
Was I at all a man enough before taking my place in this tower?
4.
My son and daughter have wonderful faces like those fluffy angels in a dream.
I have been thinking: Can one see such dreams in this tower?
My wife who loves me like a magnificent queen,
And is my partner in all the crimes that I have committed till date,
Was the one who made all the installations in our home:
The wood carved fine leather upholstered furniture,
The ornate lighting, the embroidered carpets,
And the stainless steel digitized contraptions to do this and that to perfection.
My God, the things look so nice and cool,
And provide you with such deadly comfort,
That our home almost looks like the insides of a medieval fortress.
In this cave, at times floating on strange clouds, we play hide and seek,
Make fun of each other, quarrel, see horrendous films, listen to rock,
And sleep and eat and defecate and party, coming and going,
Coming and going, day in and day out.
Do we get bored in this tower? There is no definite way to tell you this,
Because when we get bored we skip channels, change our gym routine,
My wife orders for new food, we try out avant-garde stuff in films and theater,
Read poetry, and make love on different beds,
And even change drivers and servants.

One night – the stars and the half moon twinkled so brightly in the sky,
While the lights from the city looked sad and diffused –
I was teaching electrostatics to my children.
You must be aware how tough it is to teach adolescents,
Something like charging of a gold leaf electroscope by induction.
As I jumped into the most dramatic part of my discourse,
My daughter furrows her brow, raises her hand and blurts:
Sandy man, I’ve something to say.
Although I felt irritated to the core, but you know,
When this tiny fiery woman has something to say, you can’t stop her,
My son feels agitated and almost taking my side reacts sharply:
Come; say, what all you have to say quickly,
Don’t you see Sandy man is making such a bright effort?
Then my daughter asks me this question:
Tell us you Sandy man; how far is the soul of the city from our tower?
My son becomes thoughtful at the question and as a rejoinder asks:
How can one say, Sandy man, where the soul of a city lies?
Frankly, I feel like a charged electroscope and I end up saying:
The city is so far away from us and its soul, my dear children, lies buried
And if at all you want to find it, you need to unearth a prickly riddle.
At this point my wife makes her glorious entry into the scene and declares:
Sandy let us all go and live, by the side of a sinuating river,
You promised to build a cottage on an enchanted shore during our courtship.
Memory is something you are incapable of forgetting,
And I marvel at my queen’s memory,
With which she strikes me almost every time at the right hour.
The children start singing a meaningless song,
Boisterously breaking the dead silence of the night,
Amidst this increasing cacophony, my tigress gives me a look,
Which tells me she will fall in my ferocious embrace the moment,
I leave all this mess and catch her.
It happened just then,
Our tower took off into the sky like a rocket!
5.
When we do not feel like sleeping which happens many a time;
I tell them: stories, mostly spooky stories.
I told them one a few nights back:
I got down from my car, proceeded towards the elevator well in the tower,
The tower consists of two elevator wells facing each other.
(We are the only residents in this tower).
Both the elevator cubicles were waiting tirelessly at ground zero,
For somebody to occupy their space.
I feel very confused about which elevator to board,
So I have made a principle of sorts:
While descending I will drive down the southern well,
Whereas on my way to the top I will drive up the northern well.
I board the northern cubicle, hungry and tired but happy to be back home.
The doors of my elevator close making an unpleasant sound,
And I push the button for my floor.
My eyes by fleeting chance fall on the opposite elevator with doors shut;
It looks utterly glum and is melancholically illuminated by its fluorescent lamp,
It’s vacant and at rest; I find in it a ball of smoke encircling like the ring of Saturn.
As my elevator kick starts and rushes upwards I find,
The opposite elevator rushing upwards all of a sudden almost at an equal speed.
When we race past each other through the intervening floors I can sight,
The other elevator momentarily through the glass panels of our respective doors:
The emerging ball of smoke growing inside its somnolent chamber,
Into something more concrete which I cannot readily grasp.
As we leave the sixth floor behind,
The ball of smoke was gone and instead I found a man,
Standing in a grotesque posture looking vacantly at me.
He hardly moved; his hungry gaze on me more intense with each passing floor.
Once we had crossed the tenth floor the other elevator accelerated,
And crossed mine leaving me terror struck and suddenly I realized,
That this man almost looked like me (he was my body double),
Wore the same clothes and carried the same bag and file of papers;
It was this mesmerizing similarity that filled my soul with endless darkness.
Was this man a heinous imposter?
Was this man a terrorist?
Would he harm my wife and children?
At last, I reached the floor where I live,
My chest thumping and heaving against my frail rib cage.
My hands shook as I pressed the entrance bell,
A few seconds later, our maid had opened the door.
When she found me standing in front of the door,
She instinctively turned around and rushed inside calling for my wife.
When she was turning, I had glimpsed the shock in her eyes.
Surprisingly I did not enter or make any move,
As if I was waiting for approval of others to enter my own home.
My wife came and the children followed,
She came to the door; I saw a queer look in her eyes (the children looked awestruck).
When she spoke, she sounded restrained and withdrawn:
What a look alike, unbelievable!
Nobody can believe this.
My dear man, don’t harm us, my husband is back at home,
He has gone to the washroom to take his bath.
Tonight we will leave to see the mother of all rivers;
As you would know, it is a long and a tedious journey.
Spare us my good man,
If you need anything, anything from us I am willing to give,
If you want our home in this tower, you can have it,
We will be leaving for good.
6.
My wife belongs to lands where fables are written,
I snatched her from a fable and made her mine.
In doing so I made her the heroine of one fable,
And a vamp in another.
There are days when we go to the terrace of this tower,
Soaking sun in our burnt out bodies, standing taller
And looking breathlessly at the city,
Which feels like a crouching demon, inching towards us.
Will we feel like immigrants forever on this planet?
To douse our eternal fears we pray; we pray like devotees are required to pray.
We end all our prayers with one line:
Let this city keep some space for our children,
Whose faces resemble those fluffy angels in a dream!

Ascent of Sap

2009-09-10T11:35:00.004+05:30

A few days back, I was teaching my son: ascent of sap (Biology). It is all about how nutrients flow through root capillaries to the upper reaches of a plant and its leaves.

Soil is rich in mineral nutrients dissolved in sub-soil water. Root hairs of plants are deeply embedded in soil layers. Capillary action sucks these nutrients upwards. The nutrients with the help of chlorophyll and sunlight create food for the plants in the miniscule chambers of plant leaves. Life will not continue with this fundamental process getting interrupted and diminised.

In the night, a thought struck me: How marvelously nature has contrived with all its constituents and resources to sustain life on our planet!

At one level this thought made me feel uplifted bringing tears to my eyes. As we all know in such moments of self-discovery we are prone to deflect our wavering minds to finding a meaning of life. How can such complex processes leading to creation, reproduction and sustenance of life have no meaning or not transport an implicitly coherent symbol? During these spells of intense sentimental thrusts playing inside my chest I have to hold myself not to get carried away.

Around midnight I started looking at the phenomenon more clearly: The amazing beauty is in the comprehensive effort of nature. It is brilliant and perplexing in all its magnitude, relentless and unyeilding. The birth of life including the birth of intelligence and consciousness, I believe, is without any preconceived design or purpose. It must have happened because of a specific series of random movements, sparks and collisions that happen otherwise in every nook and corner of the universe countlessly in a micro-fraction of a second. What an accident it must have been that resulted in the birth of life and later intelligence and consciousness.

As pale beams of morning light lazed inside my room I realized an old strain of thought rising in my soul: The matrix of consciousness is infused with two forces - one, that helps us to feel in harmony with the darkness of the cave from where we emerged and two, one that makes us insecure about it.

This insecurity is at the crux of all art, enterprise, philosophy, ideology and political experiments. We have created an alternate nature of civilazations that works on the machinations of its various institutions.

Man created primeval institutions while engaged in battles against natural hostilities in the early years. Thereafter these institutions have been gradually made into grasslands of power battles run on emotive ideas in the name of good for the human civilization.

Religions, nation-states and family evolved in the process. Industrial economics and retail consumer markets have hit the final blow to the evolution and sustenance of communities (as the largest unit of mankind) and the individual (as the smallest unit of mankind).

I am sure about one thing: A man in the 15th century felt much happier and contended than a man in the 21st century because at that point in time we were still evolving. We did not know we had chosen a path that will kill all of us. We did not know we had built this path fanning the darker force of consciousness that gave us power to interpret; find meaning; assign meaning; and add, subtract, divide and multiply on nature. One does not need to go into history to know that. Art and literature will prove my point.

Morals and ethics ...

2009-07-02T15:47:00.000+05:30

Morals and ethics are built around the idea that life is meaningful. Elsewhere, it has been amply established: life is meaningless. We know it for sure (from our own intense experiences of life); we may not voice it. Once we start believing that life is meaningless the burden of passing time, which essentially life is all about, seems monumental and nerve shattering.

We like to believe: we are here on a special mission; we are special people cut out for special purposes. Chasing this belief we fend ourselves from the weight of time.

Morals and ethics are about good and bad based on various frames of reference. We aspire to goodness secretly desiring goodness to be returned to our own lives in some way. When we end up doing something bad we pray to reverse the effects of badness (committed by us in the first place) shadowing our lives. We think implicitly that such cause and effect exists in the universe of morals and ethics.

I had come to know of a queer woman from a friend. She was (I’m saying in the past sense because I’ve no knowledge of her in the last 6 years) an instinctive sexual carnivore. She was happily married and had a steady family. She was hooked on to a rare breed of men – rich, intelligent and full bodied. It’s not as if she did not want to check herself from sleeping with these men. She did (in fact she suffered from a serious moral dilemma) every time she changed men [as confessed to my friend] and every time she cheated she felt sick of some illness or the other. In the thickness of her suffering she vowed every time to lead a devoted family life henceforth; thinking that the pain of illness was nature’s way of punishing her for her unbridled craving for sexual gratification.

I also know of a man who is sickly successful in almost every endeavor that he takes up in spite of employing minors in his house for doing all the tedious household chores and behaving with them in the most uncouth manner possible; I’ve also heard of rumors of his beating them up at times. There are people who are envious of his success more so because they want his ill treatment of minors to be avenged in the most immediate manner possible.

The universe of morals and ethics, I’ve concluded, is an imaginary one and more often than not is a swing ball used by the powerful against the powerless.

The universe is a chaos.

Our minds are warehouses of chaos.

We are always on a ride to comprehending the extreme ends of the chaos, one outside and the other inside.

Morals and ethics do not help us in this journey of comprehension …

Waiting for rains to come ...

2009-06-23T17:59:00.000+05:30

Everyday passing without rain is a torture. The prolonged spell of scorching heat coupled with humidity is getting to the nerves. Climate change is no longer a matter to be discussed and debated at conferences. It is something we are experiencing on a daily basis. There was a time in Kolkata when, after June 8, two days of damp heat would invariably get us rain.

The death of seasons is here to stay. The sad part is: we know why all this is happening; yet we won't do anything about it. Maybe because it requires a fundamental shift in our lives and in every thing that we do and in every way that we do.

Will we destroy ourselves finally in a complex vortex of economic and military wars?

We have come a long way doing various political experiments - dreaming and failing in the process - without realizing truly the restless, angular and hideous nature of human consciousness.

In our desperate attempts to live longer and making savings of all kinds for the future we overexploit our surroundings thereby leading to disharmony.

In spite of knowing this it is nearly impossible for me to renunciate a life of comforts and privileges.

We are waiting for an evening swept by wild rains. It certainly is a much bigger comfort and privilege than being housed inside a palatial mansion or traveling by a limousine. This is very clear today ...

I am an atheist. I do not pray. For the first time in my life I have started praying for a view of the thunderclouds to hang on the Kolkata sky and explode ...