#011- Rain

It rains slightly. After two years. The city parches.

For weeks I prayed that it rains. I even commissioned a wiccan chant for it. Every morning I woke up with the hope that the clouds gathered in the night would stay, and push the city into a less subtle darkness. But every morning, the sun has peaked through mercilessly, yellowing another day into reality.

Why does it not rain anymore in Bangalore, I ask Suraj.

Because Maya has jinxed it, Suraj says.

Maya’s jinx is powerful for the wiccan chant has not worked. But today when she is not here, the clouds decide to take a chance. A wind blows and a few drops of water fall tentatively. A red ice-cream cart rolls by, the ice-cream cart man oblivious of their fluidity being returned to things.

But too much desire has waned my excitement. Impatience has given way to a dreamy indifference. The doleful rain is now just one of the regulars. Happening when it does.

 

#010- First Encounter with the Zen Master

“Are you crazy?,” was the first thing he asked. Then without waiting for a reply, he rambled on… “Lazy and crazy. I had that written at my tea shop. I served only black tea. Used to romp about other tea stalls looking for people drinking black tea or coffee. They were usually foreigners. I would then lure them to my tea shop and show them what’s not in the maps. Look…here’s my album. It has more than what any map or tourist guide will ever show. Now you must have heard about Bhimbhetka cave paintings. But what you would not know that paintings like these are even here at Sanchi. Now no one will tell you that, except me,” he closed with some pride.

He was wearing dark blue pinstriped trousers, a purple windcheater and and a rather attractive string of white and aquamarine pebbles ’round his neck. On his head lay a mop of wavy gray hair and another mop of beard and moustache covered his face. “I really like your necklace,” I remarked with a smile. He beamed back with some bashfulness and said, “Yeah, it’s a present. Everything I get, is…from the people I meet.”

While we struggled to get in any word edgeways, he continued, “Look, I receive letters from all over the world,” showing us a stash of postcards from various countries in his album. “So many of them! This woman from France wrote to me…and then there is one from this Czech couple…I had asked them all if they were crazy. When any of them saw ‘lazy and crazy’ scribbled on the board of my tea shop, they would laugh and ask me what was wrong. I am totally crazy, I would tell them. Are you crazy? I can only be helpful if you’re crazy. Otherwise you can go and see the Stupa yourself. Now funny thing is…people never know how to see the Stupas. They make a mistake. They always go to the first or the third Stupa. But the second Stupa is the key. That’s where the introduction starts. You can only understand the first and third Stupas when you begin at the second. But it is often ignored, the second one…The sunset is lovely from there. It’s my favourite. But I know of other places, better places, and I show them only to crazy people.”

Are we crazy enough for this one, we wondered nervously standing at the porch of Marshall House, which was probably a hundred years old. A product of the colonial era, it had been used by as a PWD guesthouse till the beginning of this century. It seemed to us that its huge chimney had been converted to resemble the pyramidal top of a Hindu temple, whose loud proclamation stood oddly against the serenity of its surroundings. The house had now been acquired by The Archaeological Survey of India to be shuttered up in cobwebs, dust and broken glass from the multi-coloured windows. It had attracted us as soon as we had set our eyes upon it. The rough hewn stones, careful woodwork and sloping roofs with Victorian architecture spoke of another time altogether. And to find it placed in a quiet green lawn in a tiny town of nowhere and whose bus stand had no buses was a bit unexpected. Yet we wondered how we had never heard from the many visitors to Sanchi, a mention of this place set against the backdrop of a huge banyan tree with its swinging dreadlocks. It was unhidden from the road and even mentioned on the boards installed by the Madhya Pradesh Tourism. Pleasantly cool morning sunlight swept the floor of the partly shaded porch, as I attempted a very awful sketch of this neglected place. We were watching the shadows with some fascination when he found us.

“I have a theory about this house,” he declared without much preamble. (As we were to discover later, he had quite a few mind-boggling theories about a lot of things…) I think a white man with a good soul was killed here. Look, the place is designed in the shape of a huge cross. You can’t really see it now, but you will make it out from above the house. I think his ghost still moves about here. One evening, I spoke of this theory to a Russian couple who were staying here when it was a guesthouse. When I visit them the next morning, they are frantically packing all their stuff. What happened?, i ask surprised and concerned. They look at me totally scared and say, all the things you said…about the ghost of a man, are true. After staying here for a night we are totally convinced, and we can’t stay here anymore…later, I got a postcard from them too!”

He sat on a window sill as he told us his stories. I noticed he had strange, gray-blue eyes. Almost as if they could not see. Fish-eye, I thought in my head. My mother used to say I must eat the eye whenever had fish for lunch. They are good for my brain, apparently. But to me, fishes’ eyes had always been somewhat disgusting, dead and intriguing. His looked keenly at me and at everything. For a moment I wondered if he was the ghost he was talking about…but just for a moment.

“Now I can write back to these people, but like I said, I am lazy. Look, this woman here wrote to me in Spanish”, he said thrusting a note into my hand. She taught me some Spanish when she was here, and I taught her Hindi songs. Bollywood, mostly. Though I hate Bollywood, Hollywood and all this telecommunication. I don’t own a cellphone. They try to give me one but I say if you give it me I will throw on the railway track. What is all this nonsense. Some people cannot stay away from it even for a moment. But this lady stayed at our house for a month. She loved the cave and used to spend her entire day there- reading, thinking, napping…At our house, she learnt how to cook and wear a sari. My wife and daughters helped her. I have three kids: two daughters and a son. You just have to meet them and you will like them immediately. My elder daughter is very good with foreigners. She is twenty-two and is a teacher at the madhyamik school.”

After about ten minutes of talking, we had realised that we couldn’t make a Sanchi trip without having him around. “I normally stick only to European people. They don’t have moustaches. I hate people with moustaches. People with only moustaches, I mean…,” he clarified, realising his own property in a moustache. “Why does a man grow a moustache? Only to look manly. He cultivates it, grows it big and covets it. It is a sign of ego, arrogance…this moustache. You will notice, Goddess Kali… she is always depicted as stamping on a Shiva with a moustache. And all the rakshas guys have moustaches exclusively. Not that I call myself Hindu as such or even religious…You see that place near the banyan? They found a shivaling there, and there is this mosque opposite. So Hindus and Muslims begin to fight for the land. Ultimately saying that it was the only way to finish the fight, the government took over the land. Clever, ain’t it?,” he said with a twinkling eye. “Religion is nothing but politics.  But this place…India, is so full of moustaches…I can’t bear them. They know nothing and they want nothing but to show off…” Thankfully he did not seem to notice my hairy upper lip. So we went along with him to his favourite places.

#009- Interdisciplinary Jams

He was talking of freedom. That heady rush of freedom when you are allowed to step out of the house at any time because your family doesn’t bother about your “well-being”, freedom in which you can smoke tobacco by the roadside and nobody will have even a cursory glance for you, freedom where you can yell the dirtiest of abuses at the top of your voice and  no one gapes at you with an open mouth.

He was talking of washerwomen. What a far cry from my own middle-classed world of prissy, virtuous, well behaved ladies! Two different classes- one naturally deemed the better. Yet the so-called worse off enjoys her freedom, while our fragile princess is shut in a gilded cage of her reasonably sized home built with bricks of culture and reinforced with the cement of values. That bewildering relativism…

“So how do we resolve this?” A student asked conversationally.

“Resolve this? Why do want to resolve this?” He was baffled. For him there was poetry in the situation, a dark verse through which life crossed paths once in a while to laugh its cruel irony. It was a sad lament of the human predicament- to be painted, sung and marveled at. To be thought of on gray afternoons when the rain strikes window panes while one smiles derisively and exclaims aloud in sudden passion, “Ah life! You beautiful beautiful babe! How you mock me you vile thing…how mercilessly you do!” What did resolution have to do with any of it? It was a tale of constant battles with life and one’s loss, and what a bittersweet trail of loss it was…To think of “resolving” was to think of how to win. Resolutions envisioned the end of battles…resolutions envisioned peace…the calm, quiet, relaxing, deadly, horrible peace! Resolutions meant knowing that one wants that tranquility with all its repose and all its sedatives. Looking for a resolution meant being sure what he was looking for. And how could he know? Could anyone, ever?…

“But…” the student interrupted awkwardly, “I am a lawyer…”

A lawyer, yes. He was a lawyer alright. He was a social engineer. A problem solver. Resolutions were his living. Resolutions were his thing. He looked for solutions. He idealised justice. He wanted to make things right, make things smooth, make the world a better place. Where human predicament was warped in agony, he wanted to lend a hand and make the pain go away. He was a healer. He needed to know how to heal better. He needed to see problems in order to resolve them. Poetry does not put pennies in one’s pocket nor does it ensure better healthcare and freedom for women. Law does. “And so I need to know what is right. I need to know what I am fighting for,” the student concluded.

“But my child, how can we know the right and wrong so easily? Who is to judge which culture is better? And who indeed can be an impartial judge, for we are all remnants of one culture or the other.”

The student was ruffled. Then he was enraged. “So? There is no right or wrong? Women don’t need to have more freedom? Everything’s fine as it is because no culture is better? Law should just leave things are they are? What kind of sophistry is this!”

“No no no, of course not! This is no sophistry. But it’s a bit more subtle than resolving things. It is certainly much more subtle than being right or wr-…nah, not even wrong, right and not as right. There’s far more to think and observe than it would seem. The rule of law comes with its own problems.”

“We need to make things work. Even though we can’t find the perfect solution, and we perhaps never will, but we need to find the next best thing. The lesser evil. It’s the best solution we have: To find the closest to right and the closest to wrong and uphold the closest to right, condemn wrongs!”

“And you cannot do that by escaping judgments of culture.” He sighed. “But an academic desires logical consistency…” he murmured to himself as he picked up his book of poetry which lay on his volume of The Elegant Universe.

The student stormed out. “They call themselves feminists but they will just sit and watch a woman suffocate in her suppression. And rue they can do little about it because it’s so complicated? I give her what she wants, I stop her suffering. I make an actual difference,” he muttered.

#008- 411

When Bhindi was arrested, we decided it was the final straw. He had been picked up by a police superintendent while rifling for 411 on his laptop in a neighborhood café. Apparently, they were pressing charges for theft. Bhindi had been one of us, helping us get to the stuff on which we used to binge together. His loss hit hard.

There was a fairly impressive piece in the newspaper the next day: ‘Local youth arrested for stealing assets worth Rs. 30 crores.’ A mug shot of a red-eyed Bhindi looking slightly bored accompanied it. The public was thus informed of the seemingly harmless looking young man who had single-handedly been running a racket to thieve the property of good, honest and hard-working writers, artists and musicians. He had then been smuggling the goods into a rapid-growing underground market of an illegal but much sought-after psychotropic substance called isoinformo heptaeolas. Popular among the junkies as 411. The news clip then ranted about the degrading values of the young generation, who feel pride in living a life of decadence and meaninglessness, while infecting the social fabric with their immoral conduct and pilfering the national income. It was quite moving.

“Know what? I had no clue we smoked up 30 crores,” I remarked.

“Uh huh, me neither,” Tippi muttered as he polished his guitar. He was concentrating hard at it.

We observed a moment of silence to mark respect for our lost comrade. It had been a good run with him. The sky was very blue outside. Mid-August, and a dry spell in the mid of monsoon.

“What now?,” I asked.

“We’ll need more of it. Let’s go,” Tippi said, getting up.

We walked outside into the sunshine. It pricked our eyes so I looked up fiercely at the sun. Then we closed our eyes and crossed the street, took a right turn, bumped into some parked vehicle, changed our direction and kept moving. Komil had taught us this trick. If we closed our eyes and just kept moving, we could reach wherever we wanted if we didn’t know where the place was. Or what place it was. It always worked for us. A pretty neat trick, I would say. We hadn’t heard from her since she had gone out to meet a new friend a couple of nights ago. She didn’t know where he lived, so she had probably used this trick.

At the time, I had been living with Tippi, Komil and Bhindi. I had no money and used to write occasionally on paper, on internet and on walls. Tippi and Bhindi would play their guitars. Komil was a ballet dancer. We were starving in our ragtag clothes, writing beautiful songs and trashy poetry. But happily enough in order to survive, we needed only one thing: 411. And to know that we had transcended the so-called essential need for food gave us a certain kind of power. Even made us feel like God, with the entire world spinning around us. (though that could perhaps also be attributed to the dizziness which sets in on some sunny mornings when you get out of bed with nothing in your stomach).

I reckon we were addicts and 411 was our drug. That would have been plain and simple. Except I did not like plain and simple and I did not like to think of ourselves as addicts. Addict is such an accusatory word. And unlike an addiction, 411 was not a mere craving, it was indispensable. Even if everything else was taken away, 411 was enough. 411 was freedom, and the thought of living in a world where we could not use it was not just frightening but unbearable, even to the point of disgusting.

So we were hunting more 411 now.

When we opened our eyes, we were at a tall building which read, Ministry of Information and Broadcast.

“This is the Ministry of Information and Broadcast.”

“Looks like so.”

“Why are we here?”

“I don’t know. Let’s go in and see.”

We entered the building. It was kind of dingy inside, but we kept walking.

“What do you want?,” a rough voice asked behind us. We turned to see a man dressed in khakis.

I was groping for an answer when Tippi broke in excitedly.

“No…I know! We are important people!”

“Oh yeah?” The man regarded our clothes with some contempt.

“Yeah,” Tippi said. “Yeah, very important people.” I could see he was gaining more confidence with every sentence that he spoke now. “We are very VIP, and we need to see other VIP people.”

At the mention of VIP, the man stood up straighter because the distinction between very important people and VIP was a significant one. There was no suspicion on his face now, only deference. It was as if a password Tippi had uttered had unlocked the system.

“I know our clothes are shabby but this is only because we were robbed,” he went on.

“We were on a governmental survey of 200 villages and we were robbed and our money was taken and our vehicles stolen and our men kidnapped. It has been a great tragedy.” I nodded my head violently in agreement.

“There is a huge threat….a huge threat looming upon this country,” declared Tippi with authority. Then he leaned in closer to the man and said in a low voice, “Terrorists.”

I was still nodding my head and it seemed that the dizziness from nodding was giving me a high which accelerated my rate of nodding. The man’s eyes darted from Tippi’s serious face to my head and back again, as if watching a tennis match. His expression was anxious and fearful.

“So we need to see the minister right away. Do you understand?,” urged Tippi.

“Yessir….yessir!,” the man stuttered and seemed to wake up from his reverie. “Right away!” Then he disappeared down the dark hallway.

When he returned, he dragged us to a room down the dark corridor. “B___ T___ , Minister of State, Department of Electronics and Information Technology, Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, Government of India”, the name plate on the door read.

We knocked and went in. The room was brightly lit and blinded us for a second in light of the darkness outside. I made a low obeisance. I wanted to be very courteous because this was a very VIP person who deserved a lot of courtesy.

“Good morning ma’am.” I heard Tippi say while my eyes made out a speck of dust on the white marble floor.

“Who are you?” said a voice.

“Ma’am. We have come to you because we have some very threatening news.” Tippi explained.

I straightened myself to find her looking at him. He looked very serious. Tippi could be very serious when he wanted to be. When he meant business he meant business and everyone who saw him knew that.

“Yes ma’am. We think there is a grave and imminent danger to the security of the State and it directly concerns this department.”

“Oh?” She was regarding him with some suspicion.

“Yes ma’am. We have just returned from a survey in 24 Parganas and have discovered terrible developments are taking place there.

“Oh?”

“Yes’m. Some very dangerous 411 stocks…some very special ones….and in very large quantities…are being transported and consumed there.”

“Oh?” She was looking very concerned now.

“Worse, they are being smuggled across the border to the enemy. All of this is being done clandestinely and in deep secret…by terrorists.”

There was a sharp intake of breath and she looked fearful.

“Wait…but you haven’t heard the worst.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. You haven’t. Well here it is…the word goes that the 411 there is so dangerously effective because it comes directly from the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology…right from this very department.

“Oh my God!,” she inhaled and collapsed.

“Yes’m. We are in governmental service working undercover. But we found out. Then we were robbed and kidnapped for acquiring all this information. And we were about to be killed.”

“I was about to be raped!” I tumbled excitedly.

“But we managed to escape and have brought this very dangerous information to you at grave peril to our lives, ma’am. So in the interest of national security which means the life to us, we must tell you that we are undercover agents from the National Security Command!”

“You must do something now!” I dramatically pointed my finger at her and pushed one of my legs back in a running pose. Tippi turned to look at me and frowned. It was a powerful pose.

“Yes’m,” he continued, sober, “and the Command urgently advises this department to examine its 411 stockroom in order to determine if there had been an infiltration.”

“Yes, yes of course!”

“Now if we may help there…”

Ten minutes later we were standing in the high security room with shelves upon shelves of cartons stacked over the other, all packed with plastic jars full of 411 in them. I walked through the gray metallic shelves my breath drawn. So much 411, all so ordered! I had never quite imagined it like this. My addict’s brain was trying hard to keep calm when I stumbled across a differently coloured section at the back of the room. It was marked as “Writers”, “Musicians” and “Artists” in three rows of shelves. I opened one of the cartons and took out a plastic bottle. It had something gooey inside with multiple folds and kept changing colour like the cover of a psychedelic album. On the lid of the jar was written: Cerebrum of C___ B___. Acquired as per terms of contract of assignment with P___ Publishers.

I let out a low whistle and picked one. Tippi picked a couple more.

While walking back home, Tippi climbed the overbridge and took out all of the plastic bottles from his cartons and emptied them onto the street. It was pink, red, blue, green, and black. Different colours each, sometimes powdery, sometimes fluid-ish and sometimes solid as a brick—it all fell upon the road—on all the moving vehicles, the pedestrians, kids and beggars. I laughed out aloud, took out some of the brain pieces and began to follow suit. The street was filled with goo and colour and dust from 411 and strange cries were heard as people were hit by it and as it dented their cars.

Soon fierce-looking policemen walked up to us. “You both…you don’t look normal! You need help…” they spat angrily and handcuffed us.

Then I was dreaming.

When I woke up I was dressed in white clinical clothes and lying on a table on a bare room with faint blue light. My head felt a bit sore as it does when one has slept too much but I was enthused with energy. I jumped off the table and started walking, surveying the room. It was huge and perfectly square in shape and was bare as far as I could see. But there seemed to be something moving on the far left corner. I walked there hearing my bare footfalls echo across the empty room.

“Tippi?” I said.

He was lying spread out on the floor. Bleary eyes but otherwise he looked quite normal. Even rosy.

“Hey man. You look swell.”

“Damn right,” he replied in an excited voice. “The detox is perfection. They took away my spine and taught me to crawl! And it’s helping me! It’s fuckin’ awesome man!”

Then he moved like a slug, his shoulder folding upon his neck, forming ripples across his back. It was kind of pretty and I started laughing. Pretty things make happy people. A thing of beauty is a joy forever.

Then I stopped laughing. “Hey you know what day this is?”

“Yup. August 15^th.”

“Ooh! Long time I’ve slept here it seems. These people are kind.”

“Oh yes. They are.” He was smiling.

A phone was now ringing somewhere to my left.

“Ah, a phone!” I exclaimed.

I started walking in the direction the ringing was coming from and noticed a phone glowing white in the dark. I picked it up.

“Yellow!” I greeted in high spirits.

A mechanized voice spoke on the other end. “Hello and welcome to the 411 National Rehab Facility. We hope you have been comfortable here. We will now begin your detox process. We wish you a happy independence day.”

I started to laugh and laugh and laugh and could not stop. Then I stopped and went back.

“Damn funny people they’ve got here man.” I remarked to Tippi who slugged forward some more and let out a wide smile as I ruffled his head with my foot.

 

A slightly edited version of this story was first published in Helter Skelter Magazine on May 29th, 2012.

#007- How A Victorian Mathematician Suspected The Existence of Angels

I know I am enjoying a piece of writing when it produces images in my head. The sharper the images are, the better the writing is and the longer I can retain it. If I read something and all I can see is the written word, the text, I know I am bored and nothing can save the book. But there are times when one is reading something and one gets reminded of something else.  And this is not necessarily because the images the two texts produce are substantially the same. I am not even very sure what it is. But whenever this happens it manages to induce me with a bout of euphoria. A sort of insight which imposes upon you that everything is connected. How could two different people writing about two completely different things say the same stuff? It feels totally amazing and totally creepy. I call these my eureka moments.

My latest eureka moment occurred when I was reading the extraordinary reminiscences of A. Square. Having little clue about the third dimension when Mr. Square meets a Sphere, he is as baffled as a dog which catches its own reflection in the mirror. In the circumstances the Sphere tries to explain its nature by telling Mr. Square how it can enter his “closed” house without “breaking in”: He simply came from above! It’s like playing the hopscotch- one can jump into a square even when it is closed. But one cannot enter a room without opening the door. This happens since the square has one dimension less than ourselves, it is penetrable from the third dimension; but the room having the same number of dimensions as us will be inaccessible until we make a hole in it.

On this point, the Sphere waxes to A. Square in the following words: “I have told you I can see from my position in Space the inside of all things that you consider closed. For example, I see in yonder cupboard near which you are standing, several of what you call boxes (but like everything else in Flatland, they have no tops or bottom) full of money; I see also two tablets of accounts. I am about to descend into that cupboard and to bring you one of those tablets. I saw you lock the cupboard half an hour ago, and I know you have the key in your possession. But I descend from Space; the doors, you see, remain unmoved. Now I am in the cupboard and am taking the tablet. Now I have it. Now I ascend with it.”

Here is where I went Eureka!: Only, I exclaimed, “Sophie’s World!” I was immediately hit by what the angel therein said to the traveler who thought that it was not real. The traveler’s argument was that the angel was less rooted in reality because it could pass through solid things…like a rock or a mountain. The angel had replied asking the traveler if he considered himself less real because he could pass through a mist? Which was flimsier then: Him or the fog?

Who indeed is flimsier?: The Square or the Sphere? The Sphere is obviously more solid than a square. Surely one wouldn’t call that flimsy? And by virtue of being more solid, the Sphere can pass through everything which the Square considers solid and closed. The Sphere is all-seeing, it sees the insides of everything in the two dimensional Flatland. Some call that kind of thing God.

So do angels literally live on a dimension higher than our three? Does God? Abbott would have said yes. So would string theorists. Logically, it fits. It fits beautifully. It is as consistent as the theory of everything. And though there’s no way of validating it yet, but oh just how perfect it is!

Plus who else has used mathematics so finely to interpret theology in a work of fiction?

#006- Curiouser and Curiouser

When Alice gives Sophie two little bottles- one red, one blue- marked “Drink Me” and “Drink Me Too”, I for one certainly did not think that Gaarder could be hinting at neuroscience. But that was before I had watched Jill Bolte Taylor’s Powerful Stroke of Insight.

In her talk, Taylor explains how the left and right hemispheres of the brain work and what aspects they control: The premise here is fairly textbook. But what is earth shattering about the video is that she does not only explain what the left and right of the brain do, she narrates her experience of only one hemisphere working. And that is where it begins to sound less like the “insightful” science one assimilates for sounding intellectual at top-notch parties and more like standing on the tip of the fur of the rabbit being pulled out of the universe’s top hat, like Gaarder would have put it. One is left with a slightly open mouth.

Taylor’s extremely moving narrative of how she experienced her hemorrhage bears an uncanny resemblance to the red bottle philosophical route. The red bottle makes Sophie experience one thread of philosophy which founds itself on the premise that the universe is all one huge cosmic spirit. Gaarder traces this premise underlying in various philosophical schools from as old as before the birth of Christ- in traditions of mysticism and Upanishadic philosophy, to the Renaissance which saw the development of Pantheism, to as recent as the 19th century in the Romantic imagination and Hegel’s world spirit. The red bottle erases boundaries- Sophie feels as if she one with the entire universe, the universe is her and she is all- the lines dividing you and me, us and them melt…categories disappear. It is a strange experience- simultaneously empowering and humbling when the atoms constituting your hand dissolve into the atoms constituting the shower wall on which your hand is placed. And that is exactly how Taylor describes it when her brain’s left hemisphere stopped working- she was no longer an individual. She was everything.

But drink from the blue bottle and Sophie’s World suddenly sees lines emerge, as if everything has come back into focus. The blue bottle is individualism, which tells Sophie that she is a teenaged girl, and not an old man, not a rabbit nor a tree. Which tells Taylor that she is Jill, a woman, a neuroscientist getting late for work. Rather more practical, one would perhaps say. Rather meticulous about the details. That’s the left hemisphere of the brain working again, Taylor informs us. Existentialism, Kierkegaard would have said.

So does this mean that the 3000 year old history of philosophy can trace its existence in a separate hemisphere of each of our brains? Isn’t that fantastic? The whole history of human thought being neatly stored in separate cubicles of our cerebrum? And includes not just our thoughts, but the thoughts of the entire human race! Might even have the potential to lend some empirical credence to the meme theory. But isn’t all of it totally astounding?

And isn’t it all totally disgusting?! The glory of human history being reduced to a mechanistic process like the brain? What about the spirit? What about a soul? What about a human being something more than merely physical and chemical processes inside the human body? What about love being more than the right hormones and God being more than a synthetic right hemisphere product?

For the truly funny insight lies here, and funny because it is paradoxical: Red bottle philosophy in fact, flaunts itself as an upholder of idealism as tries to argue against the material view of the universe. The human, it asserts, is more than a machine. The human is a spirit, and a spirit which is part of a universal spirit. Even Jill Taylor in her talk describes her red bottle moments in a most overwhelming scenery, almost akin to the terms in which you would hear a nun wax about her communion with God. But lo! trace the red bottle to the right hemisphere of the brain, and the contents of the bottle start representing a contradiction with their source. The irony is similar to the one which is expressed when they sing, “The music of rebellion makes you wanna rage, but it’s made by millionaires who are nearly twice your age.” : A philosophy which denounces the material seems to originate right there in a most material entity. No supernaturals, no breaths of life happening there.

So is this the death of idealism? Has science finally managed to extinguish the notion of the spirit? Is art now to be lived via definitive brain sequences? Will “making love” be reduced to fucking for which all that is needed is to stimulate the requisite portions of the brain? Will the Experience Machine no longer ethically inappropriate  and Matrix a utilitarian reality?

But here comes the second punchline: In spite of being a scientist, Taylor seems to be frightfully concerned that the red bottle is not getting the attention it deserves. Listen to your right hemisphere, she asks us. It’s not all material, there is ethereal and ethereal is good. The red bottle is not lost yet. And that is where I think Sophie’s World becomes such a crucial work.

Writing about a book one loves is never an easy task, because one is always scared that no amount of words can do enough justice. But a flash in the head from watching Taylor’s video reminded me of Sophie’s World and prompted me to pen this post. Gaarder is a high school philosophy teacher. And though Sophie’s World deals with innumerable profound questions, the  blue bottle premise of the book, if I may use that analogy, lies largely in Gaarder’s advocacy for making philosophy an important part of the educational system. The reason why the book is a win is because it uses the blue bottle to highlight the importance of the red bottle: it manages to present conflicting philosophies in action in contemporary world. Gaarder in his case, uses the example of the United Nations. But more importantly, Sophie’s World manages to provide the reader with tools to see those conflicts even in completely new contexts. Like in Taylor’s brain science. Whoever would have thought! But that gives the opportunity to see regular things in a completely different light. As if everything’s fresh, everything’s new. It leaves you with a sense of awe, wonder at every tiny detail. Questions every assumption you ever made with thought or without. Makes you realise that you made certain assumptions in the first place. And every great work of fiction should be able to able to do that. But how many books come even close to that?

#005- Withering Lows

First of all,  this popularly revered tome should have ended around Chapter XII. Instead, it canters on for twenty-two more soul-wrenching chapters. The first hundred pages made me feel like I had hit gold, but thereafter the decline of the empire begins so surely and steadily that I could only barely manage to not tear off my hair. Honestly, had I not the OCD to finish every book I ever started, I should not have been able to wade through it.

Though I do give some credit to the narrative style: I am an eternal fan of a coloured, first person narrative, which in my opinion, manages to tell one so much about the characters in the plot without assuming a manufactured tone. Also, the passion of Catherine and Heathcliff for each other isn’t exactly the bad bit–and yes, I can only call it passion and not love–it’s one of those violent, desirey things from violent, desirey people who are almost hedonistic in their characters. One of those things for which songs like Fever were penned by Otis Blackwell. And that was something I could appreciate. And that was something which also made me ponder upon the relationship between the rise of voluptuous Gothism and the sexual repression prevalent in England at the time. The setting was perfect: Nothing could have fared better than the bleak, north country ravaged by maniacal winds for portraying two characters as intense as Catherine and Heathcliff.

Great job till there, Ms. Brontë. Point taken. But could you stop there, YOU STUPID DUMB BITCH? Oh no! The esteemed Emily continues their dramatic and puke-able declarations of love for twenty million pages till you begin to realise they are nothing but two sodden adolescents auditioning for an Ekta Kapoor soap! Dear Catherine, if you were so taken in with Heathcliff, WHY THE FUCK DIDN’T YOU MARRY HIM? And don’t you dare say it was to secure his financial position and that kind of “practical” garbage, because you forget to act with your connivance thereafter anyway! Dear Heathcliff, you were mad at Hindley and Edgar, NOT THEIR SISTERS OR THEIR FUCKING KIDS! (sidenote: fucking is well used literally here.) But no, you will plough on to destroy their innocent enthusiasm for life with no apparent gain to you–in fact, you’d actively cause pain to your own lover’s child, because that’s how irrational you are! (by the way, how in the world Catherine drops in a baby is never clear to me- because hey! doesn’t one have to be pregnant for at least nine months in order to be able to manage that feat?)

And that, my friends, is the great great romance coveted for the past two centuries.

I have heard quite a few people report that this book is life-changing, and offers a new insight every time they read it. And what insight it precisely be?
Ezekiel Jameson of Milden Town responds, “On my third reading, it suddenly hit me that just because Heathcliff has been described as a swarthy, dark fellow, he must be a black man! Bringing the race angle totally redeems the story because what with the devilish portrayal of Heathcliff, it so does not perpetuate racial stereotypes!” Kavita Kadambarajan of Veerapatanam gushes, “Omg! I just realised…omg! Nelly was really the villain of the plot! Omg! This fact omg! instead of being a piece of irrelevant gossip omg! has earth-shattering consequences, because it totally changes the world view on good and evil, d’you know, omg!”

Bet both Mr. Jameson and Ms. Kadambarajan are also proud perusers of vampire porn.

Oh and the worst argument yet: “It has managed to raise a reaction! Look at you all impassioned and fiery, decrying the book! You don’t call it “okay”, you positively dislike it…Must be good, strong stuff!” Well, so must be Five-Point Someone, I guess. A regular classic.

WARNING: WUTHERING HEIGHTS IS STUDDED WITH CLICHÉS EVERY INCH OF THE WAY. And if that is what you want to acquaint yourself with, why the hell would you want to spend perfectly good time pouring over some extremely shady text? Just go outside and talk to people, hey? Or watch a Rihanna video on Youtube. Who needs writers, right?

I had approached this book with some hope that it would fit into the sensuous mood of the skies prevailing in these heavy monsoon days, but it has convinced me by far that women writing in the Victorian era were all full of pure crap. Their need, their crazy miserable need to paint some grotesque romance where nobody seems to follow the slightest amount of reason because love is apparently blind, is simply, pathetic. And whoever claims Heathcliff is sex itself, needs her head to be introduced to a fairly heavy metallic artefact.

#004- A Wicket, Wicket Book

I first stumbled upon Camille Rose Garcia on a rumble-tumble browse through an art exhibition in Delhi. I had never done art exhibitions before, so this was my maiden run at inculcating the pseudo-intellectual bits we all so desperately desire in our personalities. Just saying that you spent three hours gobbling art makes you feel you must be finally doing something ace in your otherwise wretched life, right?

What I had not been prepared for was being confronted with Hannah-Barbara-Gone-To-Seed specimens by someone whose name suggested that they had played a big role in the central American communist jog. And it was all very magenta. All of it. I doubt if I had seen so much pink together in one place since the late 1990s when everyone was bent on steadily singing and dancing to Aqua’s “I’m a Barbie Girl” whenever they got the chance.

But turned out that our Red leader was actually from Florida, living next to Disneyland. And she was painting weird stuff: Pretty fairies going all disgustingly gooey and then melting. Bright witches on brooms dissolving against a rubbish heap. Tarred princesses dancing about in a consumerist wasteland. It was all very wonderful and very repelling at the same time. The audacity smacked me several times in the face. Hard. And you tend to not forget stuff like that in a hurry.

So when I came to know that Rose Garcia had decided to illustrate for Carroll’s Alice, I was all woah! And it is worth woahing alright. Because The Lobster Quadrille is now a throng of very serious and miserably perfect dancers who ask you to not tread on their tails.The Mad Tea Party is a lush gathering of bad-tempered loons most irritated by the fact that they have to hear insensible questions and be patient with undreamy people: social obligations which nevertheless must be fulfilled. And we have a slimy blue caterpillar smoking the hookah, looking down upon a cynical Alice from his mushroom pedestal as he fiddles with his rich earrings.

Some would call it depressing. Why turn a perfectly blind-happy-happy children’s book into the depraved, degraded piece the world already is? We read Alice to escape reality, not run back into the sticky muck which it is.

And they would have had a point too. If  Alice had been a blind-happy-happy book. But it’s not. Carroll never wrote to block the wicked, wicked world. He rather presented it more grossly with some humor frosting on the top. Even Sir John Tenniel’s black ink sketches in the original Alice illustrations do not serve to make Wonderland a fairyland: Tenniel’s illustrations are so painfully detailed that it seems they are scientific notes made by a very serious zoologist studying strange, outlandish creatures. And sometimes they are plain scary– a thought which when seen in light of the jabberwockied Alice text makes the entire thing all the funnier.

Garcia manages to translate Carroll’s hopeful cynicism in a similar manner. And with all the bright colours that our perfect plastic world prides in. Garcia’s Wonderland is horrible to the point of hilarious. And incredibly desirable to the point of hilarious. Together.

What Sir John achieved through his careful precision, Garcia achieves through her viscously cute lampoons. Something which Carroll would have approved of. “Down, down, down. Would the fall never come to an end!” he did say in the 19th century. Garcia has painted it for the 21st.

#003- The God of Grimpy Manor

For two days after I was done reading The God of Galalaeugh, I lay in a numb stupor trying to figure out the meaning of life, universe and everything. The upshot was that I could no longer get out of bed in the mornings (or any part of the day for that matter) and for the better portion of the two days had the strong desire to take a huge sword, walk out very fast and slice all rocks and people in my way into fine little bits.

It actually took me a while to figure out why I was rendered to such a violently debased state in the middle of the happy-gung-ho life I was apparently leading. The book… the book with its innocent looking cover of pink water lillies stared out at me like the devil from the dresser. Being ashamed of the fact that I hadn’t yet read one of the greatest Indian works in the past couple of decades, I had rushed to finish it in all of one and a half days. WARNING: DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME. You are likely to be left with agonising mental scars to haunt you for the rest of your sodden life.

Roy’s debut novel has been written to be analysed over for not less than half a decade. Such an analysis however must be punctuated by shoving it for appropriately long intervals in the back of your bookshelf. This analysis should first and foremost address the question as to how did she manage to pen down such an obviously affected piece of work for all of 321 pages! Did the writing affect her too as it affected the reader by wanting to do nothing less than drown herself in the nearest reservoir?  Was the book actually a manifesto intended to lay the ground for her upcoming foray into social activism and forgot to mention that on the back cover thus misleading innocent readers into its trap? Did it end up giving her a serious case of migraine too?

I hardly want to comment upon Roy’s political views, so I won’t. What I am talking about is her writing. It’s all long drawn out, unnatural sentences as humid as the eternal monsoons the book seems to be set in. True to the popular south Asian writing tradition, the stuff seems to stick and cling on to you like a leech and refuses to let go. It’s tiring, it’s mundane, it’s glosses over every little thing of the south Asian life with an intellectual affectedness. Through 321 pages, for instance, you are left wondering about why exactly it’s called The God of Small Thingies. And you draw up a great white blank, even though she devotes a whole chapter talking about the god of little things and the god of great things and the sly shunning of little gods and the placing of big gods onto pedestals and tragedies which the little gods embody and which one can never talk about because they’re too little…that sort of deep shit which makes you wonder what the hell she is driving at and why she couldn’t do it in less words and what’s the point of extending a two line explanation into half a book! (if nothing, just to save paper). And oh, how many more pages you still got to trudge through before the book ends.

And I haven’t come to the saddest part yet: The book’s about her.

From the beginning of the book, you know it’s about her and about her and her. Now you’d wonder why that’s a problem. Aren’t all artsy things supposed to be about the people who make them? Isn’t it all supposed to individuality and self and that sort of wow? Of course, now I am completely with you there. But the thing with The God of Small Thingummies is that it’s about her to the exclusion of everyone else, including the exclusion of the reader. It’s about her in a very aggressive, chauvinistic way. “Look at me! How I have suffered! How I have survived! Attend, attend, attend to me! My saintly life! My silent suffering!” is the subtext running through the entire novel. She paints her life on a larger than life canvas and as you’d expect, it miserably fails. And all this is very sad because it is pathetic and you eventually end up losing respect for her as a person. Because she has decided to victimise everything everything everything but especially herself! And through such martyrdom she attempts to get to glory. As if the ploy hasn’t already become yawn-able enough after being used by religion for over two millenia!

For all the Bookers it’s won, it’s a pitiful book. Avoid it if you can.

#002- He’s the Cupcake Man

Last weekend, I finished reading a book called Sylvie and Bruno. One of his not so well-known books for little people, this one was written by Lewis Carroll in 1889. Though like the Alice books, it is a through and through weird book, with much apparent nonsense. But as the Queen of Hearts would have said, “You may call it ‘nonsense’ if you like, but I’ve heard nonsense, compared with which that would be as sensible as a dictionary!”

Lewis Carroll remains one of the most liberating writers of children’s books. Liberating, because in his absurdity only the mind of a child, yet uninitiated into the phony ways of the world, can see sense.

“He thought he saw a Banker’s Clerk
Descending from the bus:
He looked again, and found it was
A Hippopotamus.
‘If this should stay to dine,’ he said,
‘There won’t be much for us!’”

Carroll manages to weave out of this absurdity, a beautiful universe where anything is possible. Literally. A child turns into a fairy and a fairy turns into a child, a dodo creates a sea and runs a caucus race, crocodiles fly and porpoises tread on whitings’ tails. This boundless reach of the imagination offers to a child an escape from the usual ‘No!’ which she gets to hear from the adults all around her as she grows up, and which makes her limit her thoughts to the “practicable”. Today we are too busy training children to fight “the hard reality”, be the winner in a rat-race and to give up on “too crazy” dreams. We teach them to be careful, to be scared of unknown things, and to be planned and securitized citizens of an ordered world.

Like Carroll puts it,

“Will you walk a little faster?” said a whiting to a snail,
“There’s a porpoise close behind us, and he’s treading on my tail.
See how eagerly the lobsters and the turtles all advance!
They are waiting on the shingle- will you come and join the dance?
Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, will you join the dance?
Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, won’t you join the dance?”

… and thus a world of sad, sad adults is born and thrives.

Carroll’s stories, on the other hand, almost seem to take the child by the shoulders, shake him hard and shout at him, “Helloooooooo! Not what they say! Whatever you want can happen! Whatever you dream is true! Nothing is too absurd! Not practical! Not an adult! Don’t be an adult, pleeease!” As if using all his strength to the last bit to save another child from being drained into the world of fife.

No other writer after Carroll has managed to do what he could, pull a person out of the humdrum of reality, throw him into a world of infinite possibilities and make him believe in the truth of it. Maybe Mother Goose before him, yeah, but certainly none after him.

Carroll reminds us that the world’s crooked wild. And that’s fun!

 

This post was first published on the Pratham Books blog. 

#001- Hallo R.K., you nutcase!

An elite dingbat once printed a mile comparing R.K. Narayan to Jane Austen and now the literary heads are all set to ponder upon the fairness of such a comparison. Thus my innocent hope in humanity is busted one more time as I lock myself in the room to crack my head against the wall. Let’s get this one straight. R.K. Narayan is certainly not some know-it-all social bugger who keeps advising your mum about how to pick the right guy for you. So all comparisons with the said woman should justly end there.

Alright so he did not write epic logs illustrating the travails of the human race and its ability to overcome all suffering in spite of well, all the suffering, and that kind of concocted blah which the egotistic human race eternally needs to read about. This of course piques the world visionaries seeking to debate how to balance development concerns against cultural monopolies bustering in with the onset of globalisation, while wearing kurtas bought from Fab India. But my point is, you don’t really want to hear about that far-reaching shit when you have Swami coming over for afternoon tiffin to ponder about how to get out of the humiliating aerobics the headmaster subjects him to every afternoon. Because Swami’s is an infinitely more real problem. Being there for Mr. Sampath in his tribulations gives me infinitely more pleasure than reading about the Ashok Kumar struggling on a bhookh hartal in order to solve world hunger, thank you very much!

Whether it be the quirk from Malgudi, or the allegedly new form of writing called Table Talk which he developed, all of Narayan’s warble is delightful simply because it’s not phony. Plus you have to admit it, the guy has got a serious knack for stringing the most inconspicuous words together to form seemingly innocent sentences, but which are bound to blow your mind. For instance, sample this one canvassing but a small portion of an elaborate love story of a dentist:

“He fell in love with a girl, who had somehow lost all her teeth and come to fit new ones….Day by day as he saw her with her jaws open to be fitted up, he began to love her, being physically so close to each other….”

Ka-boom!, yeah? But it does not end there. The humor is colossally magnified when one comes to know that the above mentioned sentence is uttered by a romance-deprived, aspiring-romance-novelist wife in the throes of a no-stops-romantic daydream to her very practical and devoted husband with whom her marriage was arranged. To which they say, “Pathetic, pathetic. What sort of writer is this R.K. Narayan? Using such simple diction…no refinement of  language…we expect much more from anyone who is serious about writing.” To which I say, bugger off! Sure Narayan’s sentences are not meant to enhance your vocabulary and prepare you for your upcoming IAS interview, but neither are the best stories supposed to be mini dozes of Word Power Made Easy.

Narayan might be wistful sometimes, he can even be horribly depressing if you take him too seriously, as a fifteen year old me found out while reading The Guide. But look closely and you will realise that the guy is always bursting inside with giggles while telling you about the petty pretty peoples of the world and their myriad of problems, with a perfectly straight face. And before you realise it, Narayan has smacked you joyfully in the eyes and made you guffaw at how easily you were duped into earnest belief by the spontaneity of his writing. Your aunt in the next room will be wondering if you’ve finally decided to carry the official lunatic name-tag after spending the entire Sunday cooped up in a dark room to read the heavily cellotaped, second-hand mulch which Narayan’s works are best read in.

There is nothing overtly funny about Narayan, agreed- there are no laughs out of people slipping on banana peels, or from the other end of the spectrum, no subtle sarcasm drawn from any deep intellectual tradition. R.K. is just a nutcase dressed in somewhat politically correct clothes, but note that he never combs his hair. And never for a moment does he attempt to convince you that he is anything but a nutcase. In his own words, “Narayan’s work fails. His writing is too simple, and too readable, requiring no effort on the part of the reader. Mere readability is not enough. A reader must be put to work and must labour hard to get at the meaning of a sentence; only then can he feel triumphant at having mastered a page.” See? See what I mean? The guy is never under any delusion as to what exactly his work is: A grave defect endorsing humor which has a tendency to breed frivolity and falls short of being great literature. Isn’t that what our very respectable dingbat said? Well he will be happy to know that Narayan completely agreed. And still wrote like he did. Exactly what a nutcase is all about: he’ll go on doing things which are destined to not make him great even though he is capable of much greatness. Ha!

And so a nutcase HAS to be loved! There’s not much choice there, and believe me whatever they might try to tell you, it’s got nothing to do with his “deep insights about human nature” or the “nostalgia that his images evoke.” On the contrary, it is everything to do with a well-controlled case of nutcasery.