Ye brothers of DDed childhoods!

One sleepless night and a blog post and they are re-airing the series! I am butterfly, enfin.

Hairaana

The past week has had me feeling a greater degree of morbidity and pertabation than I am comfortable with. The whole nation has been in a self-conscious state of appraisal and introspection. Swaying between decision-indecision between cynicism and optimism, public sentiment has been a palpable thing. Past horrors have loomed afresh placing us yet again on the fear-hope rack. I too have been infected by it all and it has led to a bit of ineffectual what’s-my-dharma induced hand-wringing . Kya karoon? - has been the refrain that has been ringing in my head. It is also the radeef of particularly dear ghazal. Since it seemed that a few hours of syllable-crunching is better anytime than fultile jaw-grinding , this got written.

Main akela jal ke bhi zulmat-e-dahar ka kya karoon

Bhuje lau khoon se jahan us rehguzar ka kya karoon

Kor-e-azaab se kuch pare simat ke par baitha hun main

Kaan-o-aankh tho moond loon mauj-e-bahar ka kya karoon

Aaqoot-e-khoon bikhere huye sameta woh chowk par

Ibn-e-khizaan se aabshaar hota gauhar ka kya karoon

Nigahbaani-e-gham se fursat shab bhar ki hai mohlat

Aankh bhar ke nijaat li fugaan-e-sahar kya kya karoon

*Waqt-e-khiraam ki har adaa yaad mein apne taraash loon

Tez fizaaon mein bahega hi ilm-e-nahar ka kya karoon

*God mein khet ke let kar main ek saans le bhi loon

Gaun mein bahut sukoon magar soz-e-shahar ka kya karoon

Umr bhar ke uthe huyein hai dast-e-duaa zoya tere

Katne ke baad jo haat ho aise mehar ka kya karoon

*These were written a long time ago, which is why they are different in character from the rest, which have almost a common thread of thought. But high and low alts in the same ghazal I find interesting.

Moonfull

I am puffy-eyed this morning. I usually get like that if I’ve tried to squeeze my eyes shut for half the night. You see, sometime during my second REM cycle the moon woke me up. It was the full moon, and of the particular potency of Guru Purnima. Beyond the blue barring of the summer screens outside the window, the moon was a diffused ball of incandescence. Moonlight streamed in on fairy feet. It was pretty. The correct thing to have done would have been to have admired all this prettiness for about five minutes, drawn the blinds and curled back to sleep. A lifetime’s experience has taught me that I cannot get a wink of sleep with light on my face. But of course I did not do that. There is something incredibly romantic about being swathed in moonlight. Of course, in the ideal scenario the subject is sweetly oblivious, instead of in a desperate determination to be oblivious. It was, I realised, a case of that Schrödinger man’s cat. But it wasn’t the time to think about semi-dead cats.

I turned my thoughts instead to Vikram aur Betaal. At least, I mean, to one of the princesses in the ‘sabse komal kyon?’ episode. She was one of the three princesses in a competition for their unsurpassed fragility. This one gets a moon burn from talking a turn in the balcony on a full-moon night. This feat has been indelibly etched in my mind as the height of cool. Of the other two, one develops a blinding headache from construction activity in the next town and the other (the ultimate winner) can smell a goat from someone’s childhood.

Of course, I have always thought, if Vikram had been doing his rightful duty, my moon-shy princess should have been pronounced the victor. But I suspect both he and Betaal knew that ‘komal’ was just a euphemism for ‘darned useful’. The whole point was to provide the pernickety prince with the most useful spouse.

This is how I have worked it out. Being burned by moonlight is not a particularly useful quality, that is to say, can you imagine what would happen if the said princess was to attend some royal coronation or public rally or somesuch? A broiled aubergine is not a pretty sight, even for a princess. Then consider, what’s the use of a wife with a perennial headache?

But a consort, who can smell better than your average Golden retriever, must be an asset to any ambitious young prince. A royal repast need only be scanned by her royal nose for untoward handling and oriental substances. Spies could be sniffed out in a jiffy by way of some regional dietary peculiarity or suchlike. Vishkanyas are no threat to a man with such a wife. There could be no end to her usefulness in smelling a rat, scenting and intrigue, whiffing a deception, or nosing out a mystery.

Therefore I have long since concluded that it is usefulness that decided Vikram and the Betaal in her favour and it had nothing whatsoever to do with her ‘komalness’. I also think it is a shocking thing to spin children such yarns and let them work out their disillusionment at leisure in later years.

Iterating to myself this theory was the work of about a couple of hours. By which time, my father who has the habits of an owl was bustling about the house with about half the household lights on. The romanticism of the moon had waned with all these quotidian lights and sounds splintering in from under the door. I got up and drew the curtains resolutely.

On waking up, I inspected my face as the first thing. Apart from the aforementioned puffy eyes there was nothing distinctive about my face. No moon marks, no nothing.

Karma yoga: Art and sport

Susan Sontag made her case against interpretation in her titular essay in a 1965 book on art.

Billy Collins has this to say about interpretation in poetry.

Gulzar, talking of love, so similar to art, urges us not to name it.

Kabir goes further to say that it simply cannot be talked about.

- Akath kahani prem ki, kuch kahi na jaaye
Goonga keri sarkara, baithe muskaye

Wittgenstein said as much and foreclosed philosophy.

But we cannot resist it, can we? We will try and hold that moonbeam in our hand. It is a pathological urge with humankind, especially so of our age, to try and demystify the sublime. In the forty odd years since Sontag wrote her piece we have only learnt to talk more; dissect, evaluate, codify. A sportsman can no longer aspire to the “zone” without the cacophony of flashbulbs blinding him out of it. An artist lumbered with weight of prospective interpretations can hardly ever manage to keep his inspiration unsullied by second-guessing. Pure thought has to battle pure ambition.

But like all good paradoxes the solutions are not simple. While it is somewhat easy to be introverted and silent about love and god, because they are inherently personal tools of transcendence, Sport, Art, Thought, on the other hand face a tricky dilemma. Each of these is an instrument of transcendence that engages with the world. They are by their nature, social; they deal at the very foundation, with ‘the other’.

An artist job, or a thinker’s job, or a sportsman’s job is tougher by far than a lover’s job or the believer’s job. The former set has to maintain eye-contact with the world while simultaneously attempting to break free of its limitations. Resist the attempts that the very same world makes, to lump you with identity via opinion, classification and interpretation.

Resisting identity is the fundamental problem of transcendence. It seems a particularly tall order in a postmodern world of splintered identities, a world whose workings are characterised by a near-constant evaluation of status and identity. The artist who second-guesses his critics, the sportperson who internalises the post-mortem, the scientist who scopes out trends - these are people deserving of our pity and our guilt, not our contempt.

It makes me infinitely more grateful now than ever before for the kind of genius that strives and wins this battle against our adulation, our contempt, our gross codifications, our interpretation. The kind of genius that soars free of articulation and identity, even as it ungrudgingly turns back to the world that attempted to bind it down and generously shares with it moments of real art, real spirit and real inspiration.

Use and sue

I say, did you know Mirka Vavrinec was a professional poker player? I am saying, no bloody wonder!! What would one do without the Hyderabad Chronicle in-house magpie?

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Tchah! Cheeh@! Bah! Gah! All rubbish of course! For a few delicious minutes I had begun imagining a lesser known alternate life for Mirka in which she is this kick-ass poker player. Turns out the silly Asian Age walas made a mistake and our sillier DC walas CPed it.

+++++

But atleast now that the idea is in my head I don't need to dislodge it in a hurry. Might as well have some fun with it.

Delhi 1

I had great hopes for Delhi. Sheetal’s home has all the light and air you could wish for and had I really looked forward to basking in the grace of a winter holiday. But I find that “One must have a mind of winter...” or more accurately the constitution of winter to feel any appreciation of the weather in this capricious capricious city. I find myself alternately ferreting out the last strand of wool I possess or throwing off bed clothes in a pool of sweat. Must qualify that the latter might be less due to the temperature outside and more due the fact that my fever often decides to desert me at odd hours in the night.

Fever, did I say fever? Fever - being the whole point of this post. I am wallowing in mire of self-pity and mucous. I have caught a cold and the flu, possibly a bacterial infection too! Cannot watch too much TV; head hurts. Can’t read beyond a chapter; wrist hurts.

So only to console myself, and because a warm laptop is welcome across my knees now, I have mauled Elizabeth BiBi’s poem to express myself. Can only hope my sorry state will induce quick forgiveness from the beyond.

How do I ache now? Let me count the ways

I ache keen to the depth and breadth and height

My arms can reach, when feeling out of fight

For the end of wheezing and ideal days

I ache in clutches of bedevilled daze

Most need quiet, in sore head held vise-tight

I ache quite freely, fever soars like kite

I ache so purely, as I head but raise

I ache with every blowing of the nose

Into old kerchiefs, withering to wraith

I ache now still no better for a dose

Of anti-biotics, – I ache every breath

Knuckles, knees, cheekbones too! – and, if God chose

I shall ache a little less after death.

I have found that those ailed by colds and madness are humoured alike. You will get clucking noises of spurious sympathy and badly concealed amusement. So I bolster my pathetic wheeze with a truly empathetic voice.

Einstein and the atheists

I was accosted on a London bus once by a pushy, pious evangelist. With what I am sure he assumed was his noblest smile he asked me if I believed in god. I leaned in wide-eyed, feigned shock “Of course! What’s not to believe?” He was a little deflated I think on being cheated of a cosy preach but left me with his pamphlets which I accepted with what I assume was my most gracious smile.

I was irritated, mildly, that a complete stranger would want to influence what are to me my most intimate and fundamental beliefs. I thought it was ruder by far than meeting a person’s eye on the Underground. So I was not entirely without sympathy when I learnt that the atheists in London were garnering funds for a London bus ad campaign. I was even amused to learn that they had far exceeded their own fund-raising expectations. A lot of people were willing to put down their own real money to prove a thing unreal. A rationalist/aethiest taking on the onus of proving a non-existence has got to be the juiciest paradox, after God.

All this to say, that per se, I have no objection to the campaign. But I learn from this morning newspaper that they are planning to quote certain famous persons to bolster their claim. To be specific, Emily Dickinson, Albert Einstein, Douglas Adams and Katharine Hepburn. Now Emily Dickinson would have had no option; if you need to stay really angsty you can’t afford to believe. Douglas Adams, since he had managed to convince himself that he did not believe, was delusional, ergo does not count. Katherine Hepburn – lovely lady and all but somehow I find myself indifferent to her religious views.

But Albert Einstein is a different matter altogether. Really can’t stand to see his name being bandied about by every budding agnostic who has learnt to say ‘no proof’. Especially when I’ve learnt that the very same thing distressed the man. Indeed, to a man of such profound intuition it must have been abhorrent to be lumped with and quoted by a bunch of narrow-minded persons waiting in near-religious smugness for the boundaries of science to expand and reveal all. He would have dearly loved to say, I think, a thing or two about the boundaries of the mind. He is dead and gone but thankfully the whole world loves to remember and quote the man. And since I think it is really annoying and unfair that he should be so misrepresented, I am pulling up a few quotes of his that I had especially collected for such an occasion as this.

"A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which are only accessible to our reason in their most elementary forms—it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man.”

“The most beautiful and most profound experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the sower of all true science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their primitive forms - this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness.”

“I want to know how God created this world. I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know his thoughts. The rest are details.”

“Although I am a typical loner in daily life, my consciousness of belonging to the invisible community of those who strive for truth, beauty, and justice has preserved me from feeling isolated. The most beautiful and deepest experience a man can have is the sense of the mysterious. It is the underlying principle of religion as well as all serious endeavour in art and science. He who never had this experience seems to me, if not dead, then at least blind. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious. To me it suffices to wonder at these secrets and to attempt humbly to grasp with my mind a mere image of the lofty structure of all that is there.”

"In view of such harmony in the cosmos which I, with my limited human mind, am able to recognize, there are yet people who say there is no God. But what really makes me angry is that they quote me for the support of such views.”

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What Albert Einstein or anybody else thinks need not influence anyone’s feelings about faith. Faith or lack of it cannot be transmitted cerebrally in any case. We none of us require each other’s religious views to prop our own which makes organised religion or organised atheism somewhat ridiculous. But Man has never let the consciousness of the ridiculous affect his social endeavours. We can however, attempt to draw the line at falsified evidence in a bid to influence the masses.