For a Republic on Earth

The discovery of the last year was Plato’s Republic, even though as a student of literature and history I had known the bits of it, in that filtered forms of assertions that plagues modern education. Republic begins with the question of justice, Justice in Man and ends up with a vision of society that envisages justice for all men. The premise is a catch, and that which to my knowledge made Plato the thinker that he is (despite my aversion to Platonism as a school of thought). Plato understood like, very few after him or probably before him did, not just that personal is political but more importantly political is personal. It took me time to understand this, but numerous desultory moments  perforated by overheard conversations, heated and ill-informed arguments and plain indifference, of those who are necessarily well-provided for-that mark my circle of acquaintance, led me to an understanding of as to how much and how far political determination involves psychological well-being of a people.

In the last few months I have gone through literature about experiences of people who have been oppressed and displaced, broken and beaten, divided and singled. There’s no noun under which I can place these people because academia suffers with a cancer of semantics. Every category or noun is stretched to the point of rendering it useless for discourse. Countless numbers of human faces passed across my eyes as I turned over the pages of their being or listened to the hollowed cries to be seen. Faces that had seen layers of their identities being peeled away―systematically, ruthlessly, ignorantly. Where bodies survived, the tongue had lost its function. It spoke either a language that no linguistic system could contain, or bargained itself into an economy of silences. But in both the cases, I discovered that there was something that existed despite the pogrom against presences. It was space- a hollow space. Not an absence, just plain hollowness whose occupant can only be imagined not recalled… I wonder why literature and literary theories have again and again talked of the need of being rooted not the freedom to branch out. Being rooted easily slips into the rhetoric of the identitarian politics, but the freedom to branch out is a kernel against which a larger ethic develops. I can give this ethic a high sounding name perhaps importing it from Sanskrit or Persian, but that would defeat the purpose. I shall give it a very commonsensical name- Political Morality.

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Before developing this argument let me first broadly outline some of the established premises I draw my position from. It is here that we need to define “Man”. Though the word is in the purely grammatical sense singular it is intrinsically linked with certain sense of collectivity, multiplicity and plurality. Multiplicity because many identities can exist in a cross-cutting manner, plurality because definite wholes exist without shared ground and “collectivity”, is what I would devote my rest of the post to define.  The reason I am evoking multiple senses, a necessary heteroglossia of meaning of “Man” is not to eventually conclude at that speciehood meaning of the term, but to make it known that how singular in man is always something plural. How and why, did this happen is a subject of another debate. Anthropology will make it known to us more than perhaps any other field of the study, as to why men have existed in collectives, in “organizations” (not “circles”). Pierre Bourdieu argued that this organization which is at first a mere invention of few trying to make choices of survival, eventually end up making them. The more the “organization” becomes abstract, more symbolic power it consecrates. It eventually becomes a “state”. At different periods of human history, the “state” or consecration of the symbolic power is identified with the personhood of an individual, namely a king or his progeny. Modern-state come into existence at a moment when the state instead of being embodied in a body namely “king”, becomes a wide network of power differentials (“power” in a Foucauldian sense). Its presence is felt, reached upon but can never be arrived at. Individuals like theologians of the organized religions, have established discourses, debated upon and claimed ascendency to this God-like state. Many political theorists have used the concept of “nation-states” interchangeably with “modern-states”. The rise of “Nation-states” was tied in the moment of history with imperialism and colonialism. Colonialism by its very nature is an enterprise of more than one lifetime, and this necessitates a notion of statehood which traverses an embodied existence like that of “king”. Keeping this in mind, I tried to study colonialist enterprises of ancient Greeks. I am not trying to confuse “nation-states” that came into existence after fifteenth-century Europe with that of colonial empire of ancient Greeks, but the rhetoric used by the colonizing power to recruit numbers to continue the enterprise of their forefathers is depended upon a justification of statehood which is equally abstract.  Here, I must remind the reader again that my subject of study is the psychological aspect of an individual’s aspiration for political determination. If one keeps that in mind, the distinction that I am trying to establish with the use of term “modern-state” would make more sense.  I am aware that this view of history is Eurocentric, but I guess that with certain theoretical qualifications this error might be covered to some extent. The term “modern-state” must be understood as that which exists overwhelmingly in modern society (despite eurocentrism, post-colonialism effectively brings much of the globe under the aegis). But this essentially doesn’t mean I am charting a “progressive” view of history. No political system can be argued as advancement over the other, at least not in the context I am talking of. The only determinant for a success of a political state is how effectively it could provide political determination to the greatest possible number of people under its territorial boundaries. Thus, there are native-American “nations” which may appear at sides with a “modern-state” like America. What I am trying to argue here, is a model of history with multiple time frames. A certain doubleness or multiplicity in our notion of history as an unfolding of events in time. Despite my sympathies with Marxist understanding of history, I found their notion of time as unitary or a flow, incomplete to explain modern consciousness. Thus, in India two different stages of capitalism can be witnessed alongside. So at one hand, Indian politics as a bourgeois pageant of “finance capital” stands while on the other, we witness capitalists accumulating resources and means of production (notably what is happening with electricity production) as Marx illustrated to be that of “primitive accumulation”. Homi K. Bhabha introduced an important category “diaspora” (modern condition) to complicate the simplistic Marxist view of history. Diaspora as a category precondition certain doubleness in consciousness and thereby, in time.

There was a time when certain absolutist forms of monarchy existed throughout Europe, which worked better than the constitutional monarchy of the other side of the English Channel: better universities, better system of justice and narrower gap between the rich and the poor. Something similar happened in Nicaragua. The Sandinistas did a remarkable job in ensuring social justice for its populace ―much better than ­­many democracies of the world. We are so washed up by the Eurocentric epistemology that we don’t understand that words like “democracy”, “secularism” and “socialism” are experiences of a people. They do not exist in an ethereal space to which every community must aspire for. That’s where Nicaraugua can make sense, Iran scores and for that matter Arab peninsula would have survived. When we ignore the difference between ethereality and what is essentially an experience of a people, we end up in an ugly position where ideologies easily slip into epistemology, and become the new normal or world view. And what follows it, is centuries of abuse, intolerance and massacres---all in the name of the civilizational good.

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The reason for laying out this lengthy framework was to make the reader aware of the relativistic position of his/her being in the broad arena called political determination. I hope that this kind of understanding of one’s existence as a political subject would help the reader to come to the arguments of the following paragraphs with a more open mind. Modern political discourse with its secularist universalistic appeal has the tendency to devalue communitarian identities founded upon collective constraints and sanctions that provide the necessary social environment for political connections between individual and group. That they answer to the desire to branch out. If one glances over the history of the Middle-East, we would come across a society which in itself was little of resistances or revolutions. With no high sounding concept of “equality” or “individuality”, the followers of at least three major monotheistic religions managed to coexist for some two-thousand years. It is not to say that minorities like Jews or Shiites were not persecuted, but that they survived. A feat if not better but equal to that of Europe. 

When the desire to branch out is not given a release or thwarted, we find a populace of psychologically frustrated, and eventually pathologically diseased people. My experiences as a member of a group condition me to perceive my identity, my functioning in a certain way. My political needs would be answered through the structure of this group which because of long evolutionary history of group based identities and memberships would be self-sufficient. The ruptures occur when the structure can no longer contain the identities.  Something like that happened in the History, with the advent of capitalism. Thus modern history is marked with revolutions.

I live in a country where my conditioning as a political subject is grossly at odds with that which the structure of my country can answer to. On paper, I am a citizen of a democratic nation but in practice my vote counts for little. I discovered this lately. I was educated in a polity that valorized “democracy” as a system of governance and my character , identity and self, developed around the idea that I have a say in what happens to me. But I was surprised to find how despite of what is agreed upon as “democracy” very little gets transformed into practice, not just by cleverly bypassing it but openly flouting its principles. About eighty per cent of currency was devalued with one stroke on a certain day―this when a sizeable population of India fares abysmally in e-literacy, financial literacy or simply literacy. I looked forward to the Parliamentary session in order to get some answer. My Prime Minister never came to the Parliament to answer, his ministry did-claiming to be answering on his behalf, though he had been the face of the entire movement since the beginning. My representative could never ask question, the highest executive of the country did not stoop down to answer. My vote was wasted for it effectively made nothing happen. My Prime-Minister does not have my mandate. He is only an elected leader of a particular constituency which is not mine. He was chosen by majority of legislature, to whom he is no longer answerable to. In effect I voted for nothing.

Thus, largely in the most of India a certain detachment with the larger system of governance prevails. Politics is seen as a special conditioning―outside the experience of normal. To which a few are born into, or some get infested with. The epistemology that my nation inherited from its colonial past conditions me to believe that I matter, though actually I don’t. Thus the great political depression that is the inalienable part of modern Indian consciousness… People seek to exist on their own hoping to find a justification in the matrix with values which may be called without any exaggeration, survival skills… They eventually feel frustrated because “man” is irredeemably a plural word. And thus the great exodus, of politically persecuted group, which for the lack of a better word, is called Indian Diaspora.

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I know somehow I have given the reader an impression that I don’t believe in human agency. Especially for those of us who grew up with Eurocentric values such an approach to polity might be too distasteful a morsel to swallow. Thus, the concluding section of this post shall try to balance such theoretical underpinnings. History does not get made without work, intention, resistance, effort or conflict. And all of them have conscious active human figures that do not live their lives in neurosis. But very little if ever was done just by a man. Generations tread on the same path and draw lines which become natural to tens that follow those.

It is here that we must understand the value of the larger ethic called Political Morality. That we may be educated so that we question the decisions that we make, whose receivers in effect, we might never meet in our lifetime. Certain dogged resistance to all lure of supremacy to understand the naked truth that all lives matter. I could not contain my surprise as to how little work has been done to understand the nature of American imperialism, which is in effect a direct descendent of the European imperialism. The Universities had a chance, freshly wisened by imperial experience that produced the horrors of the two world-wars to point out that what the new super power was doing was nothing different than the horrors wrecked for several centuries in the past. It was a chance to correct things in the real time, save a few hundred thousand from dying and a number exponential to that that would die. The sixty million people, who are out of their homes now, might have bee thinking of things more than how to arrange for a meal.

Iraq, Nicaragua, Afghanistan and Vietnam, or the tragedy of Palestine… The literary thinkers that have been specially trained to understand the implications of rhetoric, were insulated from the world by an odd ailment that make bodied individual imagine an ethereal existence. It’s a great loss that thinkers do not own up to themselves, a certain political morality. That we do not bring to our ideas certain sense of here and now, an immediate political or historical reference, and thus, we participate willingly or unwillingly to great massacres that happen at the edge of our social environment…  Good critical thinking can never be deduced to easy position-takings for society is a flux of complicated and conflicted currents. Political Morality might help us to bring human figurations in notion and working of a state which has become abstract to the level of a pathologically disease. The fact that Aleppo happened despite the ritualistic reliving of Holocaust memories in an America-centred world, says that every institution of the modern world failed.

A society where each individual has certain sense of political morality will be a world where the congress between ideology and epistemology would be broken. People might see things for what they are. Our critical thinking is leashed into the world as it happens. Despite whatever our parents have taught us, regarding glorification of certain group based identities, we can never reach anywhere by trampling on others. We will fall. As Europe did in what is called boomerang effect, and might end up giving future generations, broken, pathologically diseased consciousness.

Chasing Liberty

As a fleeting sense of pastness stole upon me, I found myself embraced by hands of clock, and pressed down by passing moments, while each number of the day’s hours stole kisses of life from me. I had more silence than I could afford to handle, so I resorted to that old comfort of rubbing my left shoulder with my right hand, until sleep followed by the morning, broke over my horizon. I was looking down on the earth when I found some thread that could connect my latest anxieties. There’s some need, some aspect of mankind that I had for long ignored…

In the last few days, I have often thought of a gentleman whom I once met on a railway station. He talked vigorously to me for about a quarter of an hour to me (though I can say for most part he didn’t wait for a reply)―about his philosophy of life.  There was a current in his voice―a part of me said he was lonely while the other said he was just alone. Perhaps essential condition of man lies somewhere in between―a continuum of mental singularity and physical singularity, on which resides the dreary existence of our being. Betrayed by memory, and encouraged by silence that often sleeps next to me, I tried to imagine that gentleman.  All I remember are his specs, weariness of his posture, tangibility of his laughter and honks of the trains. Now as I have discovered newer areas of thought, I can perhaps make sense of his memory which had for long time plagued me. He was searching for some certainties of life and the beyond of it. Like I am trying to do…

There were many fashionable heads that nodded by my side. Boxed into cemented coffins, these human sheep were trying like me, to find a Christ in that shepherd that was leading us to slaughter-houses… I came back from that death-house and tried to search for some signs of life, in the most morbid of places, rightly beginning with the initial of its only adjective ―metro stations. I had just de-boarded my train and was covering the length of the platform when my eyes were arrested by a figure of such symmetry and concentration, that I stared at him rudely for a fraction of a second. My admiration for that fine specimen of manhood was interrupted by an odd detail of his being. There was more space between his legs than what is usually comfortable. It had perhaps to do with that bag that sling across his shoulders and rested by his waist. In a moment that symmetry and concentration was transformed in my eyes to a mundane struggle of a beaten body to stand up when drawn seductively to the ground.

One of the most misunderstood philosophies of our times is Marxism. The bloody memories of communist revolutions are so strong, that most people run away on hearing the word. To begin with, Marx is not Stalin. In his alienation, Karl Marx tried to find answers for modern anxiety in the denial of our primitive instinct to possess or own. This desire to own and possess is one of the many ways in which we try to build a world of certainties, for physicality is the easiest of the kinds of certainties. All this was in my mind when I looked at the raw earth after my night with the hours. Of late I had been thinking of sex and sexuality (this has much to do with my preoccupation with Michel Foucault lest you think I am some creep!) and in a moment of epiphany, agriculture appeared to me to be the most sexual of activities. It is somewhere there that the initial harmony was broken, where creation meant such physical undertakings, that some of the modern anxieties were first born.

In sleeping next to someone, copulating, creation of beings and kinds (keeping in mind the conditions of tactility and physicality), man finds some position for him to hold onto. He fixes his claws in rugged fixtures and cracks, and boldly claims some coordinates on that continuum of singularities. The debates of meanings of life have always revolved around those established currencies of philosophy- reason, rationality or ethics. But there’s some other background against which this usual drama of ‘thinking’ is played, whose existence have to be acknowledged and suitably named first. It is the background of ‘spirituality’. I use this term with full knowledge of the many connotations that are attached to it, and therefore, would like to define it in order to avoid confusions. The domain of spirituality must be understood as that area of man’s existence, where he has and develops certainties for himself (for let it be understood, that belief in uncertainty is also a certainty and therefore, sceptics are believers of disbelief). I use the verb “has” with complete awareness of the notion of definiteness that it brings with itself to assert that there’s no existence without the domain of spirituality. But then it is not a stratified zone. It gets transformed continuously throughout one’s life. Even the most thoughtfully dead people, constantly revise their certainties. It moves, transforms and evolves. When this domain of man’s existence is ignored or dismissed, we have catastrophes like one that is in the Middle-East at present.

By the end of his life, Michel Foucault began to think of a concept that is still debated by Foucauldian scholars, the ‘care of the self’. Interestingly, Heidegger (or to be more précised his translators do) uses the same noun (‘care’) to explain the creation of Dasein. Also, both trace Plato as the point of juncture in thought--when philosophy began to be too systematic or disciplined. I was much struck by this noun for it is a performative utterance, an action even in speech. There’s something necessarily positive or productive in this ‘care’ for the attempt is to place oneself in the perspective of the cosmic whole. This was exactly something that I had been long brooding upon.

But what is the ultimate aim of that ‘care’? Perhaps to live a more realized life. But that would be a vague answer for I had to find something more exact, if my inquiries are to be fruitful. I revisited that figure from the metro station. I tried to understand that memory piece. If his memory had to stay in my mind, it better make sense. In deviating from symmetry and concentration, in letting his physicality to be interpolated by more space than what is necessary, he appeared to be in certain bondage, to my mind. That figure, that posture didn’t generate a sense of ease or, precisely the freedom. So, perhaps the essential aim of all spiritual drama is to achieve a sense of liberty. There’s a bench on the campus, which is placed at a location where it has no earthly reason for being. Surrounded by wilderness on three sides with a ground so raw underneath, that one expects the earth to open up at any instant and swallow it. When I first remarked at the oddity of its location, my companion observed that it’s a fine place to ask existential questions. I saw that place this morning and was reminded of that conversation. To my mind, it has become a metaphor for liberty. A set of binaries clash in its presence… which makes it a tangible matter―a fragility defended by moments against the onslaught of the hours. 

Liberty is composed of freedom but freedom is not liberty. Freedom has, (to borrow a term from Heidegger) certain thingliness about it while liberty is a condition of the spirit. The physical nature of freedom is the first of the steps that leads to that condition of spirit called liberty. Each has to aspire for it on their own, in a struggle and quest that is personal and often, private. Therefore, all historical movements that aspire for liberty stop at the physical threshold of freedom, though often its mothers and fathers had had achieved that condition of spirit, at some point or the other in their journey. It is so because liberty is a singularity… Numbers never achieve it.

Liberty has a notion of temporality attached to it. The time of liberty is measured in fractions of seconds and rarely reaches its maximum count. So, it is in moments that we are free. Many define happiness against the same temporal restrictions as I define liberty. But then there’s a difference of phenomenological kind. In happiness, the world appears more than what it is; this may explain the abundance that is displayed under the influence of its cousin, mirth. Every material object appears enhanced, fuller than what it is. While in liberty, something of opposite nature happens. The physical onslaught of the world is diminished to the extent that one can imagine floating or even flying above it. While all this drama is played in our inner selves, our outer selves remain do not remain unaffected. Most people display a tension in their gait, when they suffer with one. On the contrary if you have reasonable number of moments of freedom in your life, the earth is likely to ease for you.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines liberty as being set free. This means that there was something that bound one in the first case. What are these bonds? Ties that pull you or restrictions that hold you. It is both. We are pulled, we are held. The movement is either charted or debarred for us. In essence, there’s certain un-realization or fakeness in being, a weight on your shoulders. Heidegger defines pure being and pure nothing as the same. But then there’s an essential difference in what he aspires for and what I am trying to conceptualize here. For Heidegger it is in the anxiety that the material world slips off from our fingers, and slowly negates to zero, no thing. I am not talking of world slipping off from our fingers, but us rising above (not against) it. For me liberty is not no thing, but being no thing.

What essentially is this bondage? I associate it with certain sense of lack, a lacuna, too many absences. But if there’s some sort of lessness, that is bondage then liberty must be moreness. This is contradictory to what I have been hitherto projecting. If matter is added, things are likely to become heavy not light. So addition must be of the kind that the sum is not more than what was before. This sounds more paradoxical than the one before it. This cannot be so, and therefore the premise is wrong. The essential operation should not be of addition but alignment. The lack is not of Absence but disorder.

Many claim that they experience freedom (some masters say even liberty) in articulation, in saying. That brings the essential debate back to the question of language. Do we master language or does it master us? What does not exist in language, hardly finds representation though many such things do exist. Perhaps the enterprise of desynonymization is one such attempt to free ourselves from the bondage of language, and therefore is such an important kernel for development of thought. Many thinkers have contemplated over the role of silence in expression. If speech binds then perhaps silence can release us. By silence I don’t mean unsaying. Silence says when speech doesn’t. Can we make silence say? That’s perhaps the whole idea behind the alternative conception of the humanity.

On my first evening in the hostel, we were joyfully shaken by the cries of a peacock.  I rushed to my balcony to spot him. After some fruitless attempts, I was able to spot him―hidden under a lush of leaves, situated on a high branch of a jamun tree, facing west, it cried to make everyone hear him.  To be similarly at heights― to yell, to cry, to call without inhibitions―wasn’t the whole existence for him another of his feather? Foucault believed that crying is manifestation of our animal past for in the babbles that we are reduced to, we relive our languageless evolutionary past. A moment of animality when culture, society and millennia of civilization don’t intrude upon you... Perhaps that's why Whitman's 'barbaric YAWP' was the ultimate statement of liberty. It then struck to me, as to why poets often identify their souls with singing birds. And perhaps I do the same by thinking of him in my moments of repose and meditations.

You cross from one end of the world to the other, cover the globe in chases but nothing lightens the heart that has been weighed down by birth. Having certainties help to release you from these bonds and take part in that quest for liberty―to find that sweet melody that is the last breath in life. I walked down a busy market on a Sunday morning, when out of nowhere a child appeared on the horizon. On the road of a busy market, that child ran like she owned the world, with a guardian that was leisurely following her. I could see the world receding behind her. By the time she passed me, I had taken a seat in my mind where wilderness enclosed me in three folds, as some melody played in my ears.

I look for mermaids to sing a song for me, in the drought-ridden Delhi.

Between the Bodies

He leaned towards the brook and saw someone. He was like the many he had seen.  He moved, and saw that he moved too. Until he understood that they moved together. He and him… That he was him. He stood up tall to that figure and, knew that he was seeing himself as whole.  They smiled to each other, and he knew the Quest for the Self had begun.

I was thinking: People are not enough! So I looked into the mirror. It felt as if a stranger was looking at me. One hardly sees oneself—at least not enough! It is good to sometime just move a hand over your body, move all over it. Often there is a need to reach yourself----- with your hand. Since I am usually clad in pants or pajamas, I rarely see my legs. So, I decided that I must see my legs for one good time especially without a tap running over my head. Last time when the sight of my legs were a regular feature for me, were way back when I used to wear skirts to school. But that girl used to have broken knees. I rubbed my hand over that raw skin, and liked the sensation.

There is something that Michelangelo’s David and da Vinci’s Mona Lisa say, that even the most ingeniously minted words cannot.  One presents a moment of great glory another of desolation… But both need a human face. ‘Heavenly jubilation’ and ‘sorrowful unto death’ lie on either side of the axis called the human body. Sight of a telling face of a man can bring us to those rare moments of our consciousness when we have to owe futility of our tongue. A language-less state! Extreme joys and extreme pains, and even those emotions that haven’t been sufficiently named, all can be felt through an expressive body. That’s why I think that sculpture as an art is the most successful in preserving its context.

Human body is symmetrical. Left is very much like the right. If one look into the mirror, right asserts left with such a success, that lateral inversion never disturbs him. In anywhere else it would disturb us but not on our body. Many have tried to explain our love for order by this natural condition that we are born with. That symphony, harmony and balance are our natural tendencies, and feel depressed when we are denied that.  That the way we are made is the way we wish to create.
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He was dead. In that drain that overflowed with mass of black stingy water, his eyes--- dark with vision, were so captivating. I had to look beyond him, for one could not just stop at him. He was a part, not the whole! He was grey—hairy and grey, and his greyness was so dark that it escaped black by a nick. I knew I was wearing a sweater of his colour underneath my coat. I pulled it a little from the side to establish the analogy. Perhaps a tone lighter, but it was definitely much like his bearing. 

Colour of my costume--- colour of his body. Body is colour. Nobody can be colourless. Colourlessness is transparency. Body can’t be transparent. 

I was discussing with a good man about democratization of meanings---that people must have a right to challenge myths. Our discussion led us to capitalistic cultures, and he told me how on Delhi metro station he found people looking so similar to one another that he felt like he was in some dystopian world where only copies exist. “I felt people were nothing but copies of copies” said he. He said it seemed like the Man has again been reduced to herds.  Some weeks later, I went to a mall. My companion took me to a certain clothing outlet. Years back, I used to be similarly in awe of brands as people of my age were, but that time has really passed. This time I was cajoled to buy some quality clothes. There was this blue top that really looked good. Immediately, I looked at its price tag. Yes, I could afford it.  I took it out of the stand with all intention to buy it when I noticed that six similar tops were hanging behind the one I had taken out of the array. An array of blue--- gave me blues…  ‘Copies of copies’ echoed in my mind. I could no longer buy it.

‘There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us and not we them,’ declared Virginia Woolf in Orlando (1928), adding that ‘we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but [clothes] mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking.’ Clothes are more than a physiological or as in the case of our specie, a psychological need. They are costumes through which we can become a part of the act. You must have the right ones and number of them, if you wish to have a role. These costumes carry with them a number of metaphors. Class, race and above all gender! Can there be a life outside costumes?

I read about a Victorian woman who for years dressed as a man with such a success, that it was only after her death that her true sex was discovered. The more I began to think, the more I felt that clothes and clothing fashions are forces to keep the existing social order in place. That we are either uniformed or costumed…  That a proper costume must be sexed, and even classed.  We have been culturally conditioned to think that a place where norms about sexual costumes are defied would be a dystopia, much like Eliot’s Wasteland. A man must be dressed to the likes of his gender and class to assure people that social order is still in place. A differently dressed person challenges their metaphors and narratives. That’s why transvestites always found it so hard to get accepted in the society. He/She not only owns his/her body but often makes you realize that you don’t own yours.

A bird has made her nest on my terrace and I often visit her with a bowl of water. It is good to see that she is not afraid of me. She keeps me company when I bathe in the rare suns of January. When I see her un-costumed, I feel that the only thing that perhaps make human lives so difficult is that it is more metaphorical than concrete. Her wings are much like my hands, but I cannot spread it far and wide as she does, because I am forced to care more about my breasts than my flight.
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She was running all over the place with little care about her clothes that had become undone. She smiled, she laughed and threw kisses into air, but people were more concern with her navel.  How many times in a day do you see people smile purely out of delight? Looking at her I thought that one would pay through his soul to see a delightful face . 

After I reached puberty, I came to an understanding how public spaces are divided. Men would sometime shy away from looking at me, making me think often that there is some of invisible code that is asking me to rush inside. That before an individual, I am a Sex—and other sex. Why is there so much tension about body?  Why don’t we grow up accepting and respecting one another’s bodies? Osho was of belief that children must be allowed to bathe together so that they do not get disturbed by their natural bodies. That knowledge of nakedness becomes neither an hour of guilty pleasure nor a sin.

Only children or lunatics can overcome diktats about clothing. They aren’t costumed so are not playing any part. They are ignorant about their natural state.  And so is the well-dressed man who scorns at petty clothes of his poorer relations. The former is innocently ignorant but the latter is cunningly. Then who is wise? Perhaps the picture of a laughing Marilyn Monroe with her skirts flying away in all directions can give some answer... If ignorance is costumed then knowledge must be naked.  

The thing about human body is that it is natural, and this is the crux of the matter. People are so ashamed of their bodies, that I think that given a chance to exist outside it they might gladly do it. Since throughout the ages women have been sexually objectified, therefore it wasn’t surprising to note that women are more ashamed of their bodies than men are. Therefore we see that women find it impossible to talk about something as natural as menstruation. In a lively conversation with some women, I came to know that few find it embarrassing to see a pregnant woman in public spaces. I did not know how to react to it. What can be embarrassing about pregnancy? I came to this world through one such pregnancy, and there’s no part of my being that I can be embarrassed about. What nonsense was this!

Once at school, our physical training instructor passed a womanly advice to our team. She said that girls must always carry a little stoop. The reason for it is not hard to guess i.e., to hide the woman’s breasts. The next morning when my best friend came towards me, I noticed his gait. Apart from the fact that he walked ruler straight, I also noticed the pelvic thrust in his posture. For several days after that I looked out for boys, only to see how they walked. Even the boys who had waist lengths of not more than six inches, walked with pelvic thrust. Before I could pile this observation as another example of male hegemony, I was arrested by another waist. This one wasn’t walking with pelvic thrust for he was too thin to support his tall frame with such a disregard to physics. But here was something else that was more telling about body politics than my notes about pelvic thrusts. This boy, in complete disregard to all fashion sense and under extreme pressure to assert his masculinity, was wearing low waist pants. I wrote that while women are sorry for their bodies, men are in constant pressure to have enough of it.
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 “Why did the Phantom of Opera hide behind a mask?” asked the Beauty while drawing circles in water.
The Beast went dry hearing this. 
“Because he was ugly” moaned he and created a ripple. 
“No! Because he thought he was ugly” said she running her hand over the surface of water.
And he was drenched.
 
It is impossible to achieve peace of mind without achieving some degree of understanding about your body. Plus there is a touch of independence and even assertiveness, when you owe your body in disregard to pressures of every other body. If beauty isn’t commanding then it isn’t beauty. Two years back I met a Buddhist lady. She was trying to find her way in the University and happened to ask me for directions. Since nuns wear pretty loose clothes, I cannot tell you exactly how her frame was, but she was pretty thin with small and easy shoulders. I liked the way she walked. I liked the way she disregarded those who were staring at her as if she was a piece from a museum. I dare say, if any of those staring gentlemen and ladies had approached her, she would have unsettled every nerve of theirs by her calm demeanour. That’s the peace with my body that I want to achieve (I haven’t yet!). That you must own your body and even if generations claim for it, you can stand on your toes and say “Go away! My Territory!”
 
I had a friend in school that used to make all sort of tattoos on her hands and give our physical trainer nightmares. I was in council then, but I never had the heart to check her for this. A friend of mine defiantly maintains a beard though many communal sections of his extended family taunt him of becoming a Muslim.  It is as if Islam is just facial hair. Even if it’s a crazy fashion statement, the bottom line is always it’s one’s own body. People may be non-propertied, but they are never non-bodied. Considering the fact that private property as a social phenomenon appeared late in our history, owning one’s body is more historical a need than owning a piece of land. That if private property is the concrete expression of man’s ability to create something, then absolute right over his body is of his very existence.
…

“Do you know what Narcissus’ fault was?” asked the Alchemist.
Prufrock caught the question from a lady’s breast, and replied: “That he loved himself.”
The Alchemist mocked at that familiar self-denial: “No, that he could not love anyone else.”
This time, Prufrock heard it in his breast. 

Man is born with two tendencies, said a good man to me. First he wants to create and secondly he wants to build relationships.  And both stem out from the primary need of expression. What if both the tendencies operate together? The result could be greatest triumphs of the civilization.
 
One of the greatest and underrated forms of bodily expression is the sexual intercourse. That the greatest knowledge is the resolution between the bodies… It is as much important to accept other’s body as to accept yours. Acceptance can’t be forced therefore rape is not an expression of body. The reason why Ajanta and Ellora continue to live in our imaginations is not because of grand narrative about any God, but that they make us realize (even if it is just for some moments) as to how beautifully are we capable of expressing ourselves.

Greeks used to believe that love (implying erotic love) is man’s quest to achieve beauty. And as I wrote in my second post, a sense of beauty is prerequisite for intellect. Symmetry, synchronization and completeness—few attributes of beauty…  Einstein had a great sense of music, an art that is perhaps most sensitive to order.  Some days back, I read Pablo Neruda’s Twenty Love Poems and A Song of Despair. He was not even twenty when he published it. It was then that it struck to me that if intimacy can produce such beauty in verses then probably there is some truth in the Greek myths. Ever heard a woman’s breast being compared to white snails? Yes, that was Neruda at his best! I began to think why no writer comes up similarly with sensational metaphors about a man’s body. After Greeks, there’s perhaps no civilization who finds beauty in a man’s body, and I’m definitely hitting below the belt here.
…

“I measure my feet through sands” said the wanderer to his shadow. 
The shadow smiled at him with a knowing look, “Body can be known only from a distance.”
 The wanderer went to his print and leaned towards it.  “But by whom?” asked the shadow.
 The wanderer fell silent. He looked again at his print, and measured it by his stretched palm: “But body can be understood only by body.” 
Shadow felt released by his wisdom, and enclosed him in his arms.  
Moon gave them a kiss of silence and… closed its eyes.

Somehow the greatest writers of the world were those who could fully realise their bodies on paper. Their bodily experiences outlived them for centuries for they were able to inflict them on others. Like if it’s a touch of a careful hand then the reader must be swept with tactile sensations-----so much so that he coys! … May be like that fearless boyhood of Shelley’s West Wind…

Can a body communicate with a body in such a manner? That if it’s longing that I write about, then whosoever and whenever reads it is overcome with acute sense of loneliness and desolation. Something that they say happens when you read Dickinson. A good artist never shies away from his body. His art depends upon his understanding of it. Pain, anguish, distrust… Whatever twitches your hand, whoever trusts your hand and whosoever you trusted your hand with…

Why must the body carry you every time? Why not you carry it for some time?

The body demands an expression. I have too small and too polite a profile to convey the violence of my soul, but like everybody else I am also driven by a primeval need to communicate that havoc in some sense… That’s why I write.  I like appreciation but (no offence!) I write primarily for my sanity. I can do away with all applauses save the one that I give to myself. I cannot do without that.

Man has an ontological need to achieve some sense of immortality---that he is not an easily forgettable moment in the geological time.  An easy way to achieve this sense of immortality—the most general way is, to produce children. That if I state in the terminology of the context here, is to multiply your body. Those who have a more consuming idea of self tend to create children of mind, not just of body. This is what creative people or philosophers tend to do. Make you think similarly or force you to think differently. In that aspect, at least I want to be very fertile.
…

Wild at Heart

NOTICE: Do not search for unity or consistency. Look at the title.

They were all dancing in that red light while I watched them from a distance. Moments before I had read a poem of mine which had been much liked, and therefore, every now and then an unknown face would pass by me, and compliment me over it. I would nod and smile. I was looking at those figures---those well-structured bodies which had weight in all right proportions, and then started judging them. One had ample of flesh in hips, other had in cheeks, one had so much in neck that it was hard to know as to from where his face actually began and then---a hand was raised to the mouth , and I noticed the thickness of the fingers, and was visibly taken in by the largeness of the palm. He brought down his fingers to the palm and enclosed them into a fist. It was then I noticed that even his knuckles were expansive…  I thought I had to look at his face. I did. His face was ordinarily large. After noticing his extraordinary knuckles, his ordinary face came as a slap to my aesthetic sense that had been high… It was a moment of complete emptiness when that scene changed its form--- from a picture to outlines and my eyes---- my myopic eyes could not contain that vision. I lost all interest in the scene as meditating on flesh appeared no longer attractive to me. I had to leave, and therefore invented an excuse.

On my way back home, I kept on thinking why can I never be wholly present in a moment. Why do I end up feeling suffocated even when there’s too much of familiarity around to give me no unpleasant airs? I do not know what it is but it comes often in bits but always with force that I cease to be happy. Happiness isn’t absence of pain. So while I do not writhe in pain, I also do not feel light with joy. I have mentioned the storms that had raged in my head for more than two years before I came to terms with all pervading philosophy of gender. But somehow all that unhappiness and extreme sadness with which I had fought in that period has never left me. They metamorphosed into something whose nature I have yet to identify. But whatever it is---it makes me detached and desolate.

I walked in that same dark corridor. For no reason except the disgust over the slumber that is the order of things, a rage started to build in me. It happens like this. Again and again! I am seized with fever to say such things to people that may shock the propriety out of them. Say such stuff that may burn their ears and give them spasms in brains, so that they may understand that I at least of all can’t be played along. But then I am weighed down by generations of servility of those that have walked on the same ground before me. Sometimes when I consider the extent of kowtowing present in our cultural fabric, educational setups and family, I am forced to wonder as to how on Earth did I manage to be born with a Spine? People take months to do a piece of work that a willing heart with average IQ would take not more than a couple of days, and yet they have a class of people who run out of their creative faculties to spring excuses for their master’s ineptitude. When I meet them which I often do, I begin to suspect that perhaps the first word that they ever spoke was not ‘mother’ but ‘butter’!

Once I was sitting with a group which was waiting for someone in authority. I was amused by hearing all those well-decked men and women telling tales about their associations with this fellow who had no sense of time. He arrived around forty minutes late. Spoke nothing of importance, did some symbolic handshakes while someone flashed camera from different corner of the room—and-------destroyed my three hours.  Yet those well-decked people told me it was an honour for me to meet him. They congratulated us as if we had achieved something…  Meeting him could only merit a medal for patience!  People always run after people. For distinction, advantages, status and favours…  From home to ground, school to college and childhood to adulthood, I have seen nothing else but this. In that stinking atmosphere of littleness of mind, one day while looking at many walking on a path in the University, I said to myself that this(the road) is nothing but a boulevard of broken bureaucratic dreams. That whole education system is nothing but a funeral of civil service aspirations… That it is all about power!

One night while lying on my bed, I wanted desperately to talk to someone about some creative work of mine. I just wanted to say what was passing through my head which perhaps had no unity of thought. But then, it was a loud speech in the head which considering the fickleness of my thoughts could never become a paragraph but definitely had many well-constructed sentences. I looked at my whatsapp list in vain.  I came out of my room with that heaviness of night descending on my head, and sat on the steps of my veranda. I raised my right hand to my left shoulder and started caressing and rubbing it. It was a gentle reassuring movement.  It was then that it struck to me that perhaps a body doesn’t desire a body but a part searches for a piece. There can never be completeness.

One day I decided to write portrait of a self that I would like as a companion. Since I am heterosexual, I decided it must be a man (We can never think without gender, thought I!). I wrote two or three lines and then found myself dried of words. I abandoned him. His time hasn’t come yet. My time hasn’t come yet. We both have to walk a long way. We once discussed about finding core groups for people who think radically like me to draw support from. Since people like me always find it difficult to form meaningful friendships, such a core group helps in satisfying that primeval human need of forming relationships. I kept on thinking about it. I won’t run after relationships but we all need people at our side. Perhaps people have always used faces as currency notes to know the value of their lives. One day, I’d have people in my life who could be companions of my spirit. This would also be a determinant of my success in life. I need to know more of the world in that case. A Core Group!

I never had people in my life who could share my spirit. My critical line of thought that comes out in biting sarcasm… Added to it, life has always provided me with so many incompetent people to go about, that often I think that much of my hard work is for making allowances for people who are disgrace to the positions they are in. All I want in my life, is a place where people actually think---an education (somehow I can never overcome classrooms!) which is liberal not only in syllabi but in practice. That a chalk in hand wouldn’t vest a man with absolute power…  Adults who do not take age as the omniscient school of knowledge…  Sometimes when I see people making allowance of ignorance and narrowness of mind with unreasoned smiles and photocopies, I feel like it is a demand for a willing submission to buffoonery. That divorce your good sense and let me exploit you… Cognitive Dissonance! That I’d be fool to rejoice at jokes that is essentially going to make my whole life a farce in the long run. But then this is the game that every educational institution in the country plays, with better organization and sincerity than any real sport. When I often evaluate myself at that moment, I think of giving up formal education on the whole. But then it is too early to be disappointed in life. A wise man once warned me about this, and told me to keep myself in place when such a disappointment strikes my being. At that time, I did not know that keeping my spirits alive would be so difficult. I was thinking of this when I looked at that yellow building and said: “What is the point of all this when nothing in the world can provide me with shelter?”

Perhaps I am fed up by smallness of my existence. May be it is the powerlessness that haunts me. That despite of having a brain that can give many a run for money (I am not at all modest!), I have created nothing. I own nothing. Not even a room. One morning as I combed my hair, I was taken in by my face. My body… Even that is small. That I have arrived to adulthood, and yet I have occupied nothing.

Months back, when the result of the exam that I took was announced, many called to congratulate me. It was fine for a day but wasn’t enough to sustain my ego for a year.  I think this whenever I see those certificates of academic excellence, that all that I have ever produced is marks. That institutionalised sexuality of mind called taking an examination has been my only undertaking in my whole life… That the pregnancy of my mind would never end.

I saw her in that narrow lane while I was trying to avoid a dung cake. It was perhaps her brother who was at her side. This little fellow threw a ball that bounced back and landed on her head, making her cry in pain. I took a step towards her in order to soothe her, but she decided to take situation in her hands, and gave her culprit a blow on his head. He wailed, but she wailed louder. I was ecstatic. If I can find joy in such innocent moments as that then, surely I have a joyous life ahead. A settled heart is not the only happy one!

A good man on noticing the very evident traces of anger and disgust in my writing advised me to find some ‘working peace’---that which would make my quotidian routine easier. That whatever I have in me is not spent in senseless quarrels or strives… I left him saying that I would think about it, more because I wanted to escape that moment than with any genuine desire of giving it a thought. I knew it in my heart of hearts that he had a point for even I have begun to fear myself. There have been moments when I had to really hold myself before I could have said something scandalous. I am very capable of creating scandals.

What is ‘working peace’?

A euphemism for compromise.

I am free-spirited. In every inch, a rebel!  Perhaps the fellow played it wisely with me. For if he had used any other term- a more exact term, my bloated idea of myself would have been greatly insulted. With this economy of words, at least I was forced to think. After drawing an analogy between compromise and peace, I made an amusing discovery. All peace treaties were compromises. One party was given one thing and the other another. But what if it had not been strife or tensions, but a declared war? Then the Peace Treaty would involve war compensation. This line of thought was getting interesting. I need compensation, said I to myself. I had not rejoiced much at this when a more rational part of my brain silenced me with a knock of rhetoric. First identify who you are at war with…

There are moments in drawing room conversations and even in our usual meetings in parks that my ears shut down, and I become oblivious to what’s being said. So much so, that I can meditate upon movement of others’ mouths. How few take their chins out in order to emphasise…. Others widen their eyes and few have them disappeared… Some rub their hair… A friend who was intelligent enough to notice my inattention (I was mighty embarrassed at this!) said to me in good faith, “Not a conversationist?” I had to take support of my famed taciturnity in order to escape the situation. It is not that I do not talk. But then there’s very little that people usually talk that merits a response.  Most of the time it is stale thought that is being repeated again. People have such dynamic conscience and self, that their ideas have nothing consistent. How on earth can you follow them with success?

My heart is wild… I am wild at heart.

We were standing for Xerox when a worker at that centre took out a new bundle of A4 sheets of paper. He held one end of those realms of sheets of paper and raised the other from a little height, and released them in numbers from thither. Those sheets of paper reacted with such an enthusiasm on getting released that that they joined the other half of their selves in fraction of a second.  It was a beautiful picture… that what happened with those smooth edges. Such an expediency of action….It lightened my heart…  As I saw it, I was thinking of words to sufficiently describe the moment. But words did not come. They never come… Not even now. They all eluded me---their most earnest lover. Yes… It is wordlessness that’s the cause of these periods of melancholy. I have to write something to house me. That’s the only building that can provide me with shelter.

When I was thinking about all this, I discovered many of my poems that I wrote during those tempestuous days when I was trying to negotiate with gender. Many such emotions that I had confused with my lament over patriarchy were actually expressions of that wildness of my heart that has left me as an eternal nomad. I had that point of time christened these moments of rage, despair, distress and emptiness as the ‘seasoned greeting’. I think with these moments I greet what is essentially the purest in me and somehow welcome them. I was greeting those moments of hollowness with what is the most sacred in me… My words… My private speech is never silent, even when I have shut the vocal world away. It is finding words. Words to tell exactly what I feel…  My bloated self always assures the restless me that one day I’d be able to find words for all this. That this silence would be broken… This handicap of thought and company would be overcome. That the shelter can be created----

I walked and walked.  A little thing came literally out of blue, and gave me a pleasant surprise. She descended upon that white wall that had been by my side all this while. I looked at her for few seconds…her beak… her wings. Her eyes had a twinkle. I went close to her and felt that that twinkle was perhaps me. She was looking at me. It was at one side of the face, so the glance was definitely sided… Even she wasn’t ready to take me head on. I wanted to get close to her. Close enough to feel her… But she fluttered her wings and disappeared into the skies. So self-satisfied! She was but not for me, thought I with a smile.
What a human of a bird!

After What Can Be Said

“The song that I came to sing remains unsung to this day.

I have spent my days in stringing and in unstringing my instrument.

The time has not come true, the words have not been rightly set; only there is the agony of wishing in my heart.”

-Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali

It would be a  winter’s noon with clouds scattered over the skies like drops of paint fallen to the ground from pallet of a busy painter which forms unrecognizable yet striking patterns , when I would wish and fantasize about some suddenness and activity in the firmament. After staring for some time into that massive blue, some white lines would get drawn into the space, and these whitish strokes would rise from their source to somewhere high up in the plane of vision. No matter how much I tried I could not hold them back--------they would rise and… rise, and I could do nothing but follow them with my eyes until they would be too high for a lowly creature like me to even aspire for. I was convinced that I had seen some spirit but neither was afraid nor worried. Somehow it was impossible to pinpoint the emotions that this would generate in my little heart. It was too momentary to be emotion … too subtle to be sensation and, too spectacular to be delusion. I grew up and this familiar experience moved into some remote corner of my brain from which I never summoned it. Three years back, I read Gitanjali and felt all of a sudden, the same hollowness of those passing moments when I thought I had seen spirits, and since I was still not able to recognize what it was, it left a tasteless flavor in my mouth that often comes with knowledge of defeat.

In our lifetime, considering man can think in abstract, millions of thoughts pass through our minds, which are amply supported by our sensory organs which link them to external world. Our senses help us to mould them into words. Thoughts which occur to us in flashes, and which aren't tied to words remain swimming onto the surface of mind; they travel in our consciousness and die with us without ever having a release, much like a bacteria that floats in the air and gets into one’s body through inhalation, and travels all through our system and then quietly leaves it in a bowel movement---like it had entered, without any ceremony or noise!

All my study of literature and philosophy brought me down to this conclusion: Man dominated the nature for he had the LANGUAGE. There are two aspects of language: extrinsic i.e. communication and intrinsic i.e. thought. All animals can communicate and therefore the extrinsic aspect is true to all in animal kingdom. It is the intrinsic part that eventually made a flyer out of a cave dweller. We can think in abstract---can sufficiently express the abstract---can understand the abstract… Therefore we could dream and imagine. We can not only remember things that are of our lifetime but know that of generations before. What our forefathers learnt, they passed onto us. One lifetime is not enough to sufficiently know a thing, let alone understanding the Universe. Each man is 1.6 million years old i.e., the age of Modern Man and of which we reached our youth only some 1000 yrs ago i.e., the dawn of civilization. Thus, we could have what is called the collective human consciousness. What a man can think at the moment and if he is sufficiently able to express and record (even if by word of mouth as was with the Aryans) he can reasonably be hopeful of his thought running down for ages in his kind. That’s why within such a brief time period (on geological scale), Man could dominate Earth. Otherwise there’ve been far more successful species in terms of survival than the Homo Sapiens. Dinosaurs lived for more than a hundred millions years while we are just a million and half old yet they could create nothing. We can.Yes, language and MAN’S LANGUAGE! In a class of psychology, we discussed Memory. What makes a tree? A group of features that we associate with the word saying which would bring to our mind the general picture of a tree. We learn similarly about people, things and places, by assigning them to certain entity i.e., word, an encapsulation of attributes. Therefore, it is no surprise that as a child learns more words, he understands more concepts of the world and remembers more things. Language is memory. Words, the fundamental unit of the memory have meanings. Meanings make recollections. Recollections make nostalgia. It is nostalgia that makes our autobiographical memory---your life as you know it. All your life is words.

Derrideans (followers of principles of Jacques Derrida and his Deconstruction) occupy a significant place in the thought processes of the modern world as they were the first of the groups who could successfully challenge the relationship of language to reality. Every single word that we use in our thought process has a meaning that is abstract for it doesn't exist in the concrete world. We gave tree the name ‘tree’. It would have been same, had we given it some other name. We can’t speak or think without alluding to certain established meanings---meanings that haven’t been defined by us in persons. Who says what must be understood with the word ‘language’? I did not. Yet, I am talking about it by using words whose meanings have been established even before I uttered the first syllable.  A certain state of arousal is anger but another with same degree of disturbance is attraction. Ages before, our ancestors came across a conical rocky thing and called it a ‘hill’. At a little distance, they came across another thing that bore a likeness to the previous one. They called it a hill too---another hill. As they moved about, they came across many more such conical rocky things. They called all of them ‘hill’ and since they were more than one in number, they coined a plural for it. Later on they saw hills that though rocky were not bluish black but red in color. ‘Hills’ began to be of various colors in our memory. Then when we crafted tales, we built them around ‘hills’ of hitherto unseen colors. Yellow hills! Purple! Orange… The Mythical Hills… And then we came across deserts we saw hills that were not rocky. Again metaphorical extension was needed… Our language is our history. With every word that we speak or write, we live history of our advent. The essence of man was his language. It is his language that kept him united across divisions of races, cultures and societies throughout the many periods of grave inequalities. The first of the human societies had a language that provided us with first of our metaphors (the 'hill'. Since then we have only added or modified their metaphors. That link with the original---of being offspring of same mother, is alive in our language—the testimony of a shared paternity. In 1786, Sir William Jones, a British judge in Calcutta discovered that main languages of Europe are related to main languages of India. The similarity between Sanskrit and classical Greek and Latin was established. . A certain state of arousal is anger… but another with same degree of disturbance is attraction. With every word you speak, you carry a past of thousands of years with you.

The older a past is, the more powerful its present is. Often when you deny a certain tradition or epidemic of an opinion, you are time and again forced to resort to words that were built on the beliefs that you deny. Like I found out that the most celebrated atheist of English Canon (and my darling) Percy Bysshe Shelley has used the word ‘divine’ too generously. All that is beyond body consciousness has been historically linked to certain omnipotent and all-pervading concept, called God. Therefore if Shelley had to write about certain metaphysical attributes or experiences, he had to fall back on words that had ‘God’ as their source of origin. That’s why often as a writer or as a thinking individual, one feels trapped and caged. One often discovers irony between the said and intended when you sit down to deconstruct meaning of words. I am a radical feminist, yet when I  have to write about mankind as a whole I use word ‘MAN’ thinking that it takes the other half of humanity in account too, though the image that this word evokes in our mind is essentially that of a male. Jacques Derrida rightly says that all Western languages are irremediably ‘phallogocentric’. There lies the irony. No matter how much we defy the world and its tradition, language (or speech) always maintains that thread with ages old concepts that formed the first of knowledge systems. Therefore gender remains in the languages of feminists and, religion in that of atheists.

So, shall we give up in face of our all-pervading past? No.

The best of authors are those who contribute to the knowledge systems of the world and this means creativity with language. They create a language with new kind of metaphors. The reason why I like Gitanjali so much is because of that creativity with language. The poems are said to be hymns but on reading it, I felt that it is prayer to someone and something beyond the concept of ‘God’.  Many of it were mere sensations, that one can communicate to oneself but not to others. that it seeks to express what we feel but can’t make sense of.  Like I was reminded of those moments of optical illusions----what my heart felt at that precise moment when I felt distinguished. Tagore created a new range of metaphors.  His language though old in its syntax and phonology, was new in meanings. That’s why even Europe could like it.

They say the whole of our history has been nothing but quest to understand ourselves.  Therefore, our questions have remained much the same throughout the ages, although our answers have been different in different times. They say mind can never be silent (unless you are in a state of comatose). No matter how silent the surroundings are, there’d still be images in your mind or that eloquent ‘private speech’ that never waits for an audience to speak--goes on and on… Sometimes when you invest a lot of time with yourself, you may feel for a moment or longer stillness of a kind that you’d forget all of our past. Your language would be devoid of all those metaphors which remind you of your past. Then when you speak to yourself (the private speech) or pick up a pen. It would be a language of naked human self, which only knows quest not conquests.

A new kind of knowledge system can only be built by reaching that naked human self. This would mean understanding ourselves in a new vein. This would facilitate creation of a new set of metaphors. A new kind of language would come into existence. When sex would be stripped off gender, the word ‘Man’ would be replaced by something that would evoke picture of the other half of the humanity too. An androgynous society would come into existence. But I would not be alive to see that.

One day, after reading a bit about Brontes and that feverish passion in which the sisters wrote, I was struck with an odd idea. Why is all our literature such a celebration of abstract? Passion! And great deal of passion! I was conversing with a wise man about the essence of man and his evolutionary history. We moved around the idea of immortality, and concluded that if and when man would be able to avert his destruction through aging his abstracts would change in a dramatic fashion. Or if we are able to form a thriving colony in Mars then Homo Sapiens as we known them would be a thing of past. Such a Man with new sets of abstract and different kind of passions would not be able to identify the passions that we have hitherto lived with. Even if you try to read certain historical romances, you’d be at loss to understand many of the ideals of those ages that they celebrate. I could never understand chivalry and therefore, was much at loss about romantic love (the famous knight in shining armour tales). And then he and I were not talking of some shift in historical forces , what we were talking of would change the very fabric of our being.  The results are bound to be dramatic. What is one thing that doesn’t change with ages? That doesn’t get affected by historical forces, and whose meanings we are likely to cherish for longer periods of time. The answer is inanimate. In eternal time, our relationship with the inanimate alone holds significance. There have been very few works (I do not why) about Man’s relationship with inanimate or our understanding about it. They never talk of water and water beds, but shores and sails.Man can feel with the inanimate but can’t feel for it. Last month, I read Jean Paul Sartre’s Nausea. It tried to explore Man’s relationship with the inanimate. Some hours before, I had cut myself and knew naught about it until I saw a stain of blood on the paper I was writing. I was immediately transported to that image that Sartre depicted in his book. Four lines on a white paper, a splash of blood, together that makes a beautiful memory. My blood on that paper, just a stain… no message in blood! No love letter written in blood or threat given in a bloody fashion… just a proof that next to that white piece of paper there once sat a body that was warmed by blood that moved inside it with a remarkable sense of velocity… A clever piece of writing to present an image devoid of established metaphorical connotations. No abstract. A new line of thought! A new set of metaphors!

People who are able to do what I am talking of are mightiest of beings. You’ve power to rule the mind for only way to defeat a man is by words. Also, the only way to win over a man is by words. When you get into a man through this route you force him to recall your chosen words as he makes sense of the world. When he does that that he unknowingly sees things and says things like you did. The language that you built becomes the fundamental unit of his mind. His memory is of your words.

I am reminded of a conversation with a guy who was reading poetry of Nida Fazli. He told me how he would spend recess all by himself. I was of the same lot though for a different reason. My friends were in relationships and therefore every second that they could spare was spent with their beloveds, and it meant great degree of solitude for me. He did not only spend the recess alone but locked in washroom, often having his tiffin there. I asked him was he bullied. He said yes and mostly because he pissed them of. This made me look at his body. The fellow was too thin to even pose a serious challenge to me and therefore, I was forced to ask him: “How?” He said with some degree of attitude: “I insulted them in very creative ways. By the time they could understand what I meant, I would have slipped off from their fingers. Often I was hunted down for few things that I said days before.” I broke into laughter. I am still smiling as I recall his words. People who have command over language and can understand its semantic intricacies possess great power. Throughout the history of mankind, the only people who could live beyond a lifetime were people who had command over language. It essentially doesn’t mean writers. The geniuses of any discipline, be it literature or science, knew very well as to how to make themselves clear. The change makers are always creative people, and creative people by definition possess knowledge to tie words to the flashes of thought. The greatest leaders, dictators, tyrants, national heroes or even Prophets affected people through their speech, and it was there that they were unique from the masses. Hitler could make stir passions in thousands that gathered to hear him. Gandhi though shy by character, was challenging and exact in his words.

Invent your own language. Write about what you feel. Draw your own images. There are so many ‘hills’ to be crossed in our understanding of ourselves. Let us all try that together. Go about the world with your images, and see the world with your own mind… Hear others, read others but express yourself. In that case, your life would be a legacy of thoughts that needs no heirs to carry forward. The world would be your child. 

Call of the Sea

Few days ago, a friend put a little pouch in the palm of my hand, telling me that it’s a gift. I opened that shiny little purse with all eagerness for nothing excites my heart more than a beautifully presented gift. When I opened it, I found scores of tiny sea shells.  I broke into a dazzling smile (I am never judicious with my smile, in any case!) as it was one of the most thoughtful gifts that I have ever received. They were beautiful: tiny, elegant, patterned and mostly brown. They say that shells carry the sound of ocean, and that if you listen hard, you’d be able to hear it. I tried but found no truth in that widely circulated charming story. I look at them several times a day, and as I am writing this post, I am casting a glance on them every now and then. She said that she collected them from a beach on her visit to Mumbai. I was immediately transported to that scene where against a timid sun of the evening and audacious waves clashing against the surface, one walks on sand and hears the silence of the seas despite of its seemingly noisy waters. My heart picked up a pulse but just a moment later dropped two for though the image catered to my love for seas, it also brought alive that familiar yearning to see one---this yearning took hold of me and wrung peace out of my passionate heart. I kept imagining that scene, and the many colours of a moonlit night on loose sands…

My favourite poem is ODE TO THE WEST WIND. It is a beautiful lyric, and many critics call it to be the greatest of the English language. I may be blinded by the personal connotations that I have attached to the poem and therefore extol its beauty, but this can be said with objective certainty that not even the severest critic of Shelley can deny his genius of myth making. Shelley was a rebel and that too in every sense of the word! That powerful imagery of the childhood freedom, and instinctive joy that characterised that stage, I have felt all this (like you too must have had!). But you know how that childhood zeal and quest for freedom, and that belief that the world is your play field are presented? They are presented by drawing an analogy between them and sense of expansiveness that the powerful zephyr of the West Wind creates in the Mediterranean… How Shelley provides you with that overwhelming sensation of getting consumed by a superior force by using images of sky, wind, clouds and above all SEA… How he makes you uneasy by awakening those existential questions which lie dormant in your heart—that’s Poetic Genius!

Somehow sea has always proved to be a source for poetic inspiration.  Perhaps, because it is endless for the human eye!  No matter how hard you try to see, you’d never see the complete picture. There will always be something left for your imagination to work upon. Who likes a complete story? There must always be something left for you to brood upon and interpret. For so is our human existence. We live in a void and yet aren’t hollow. So beyond that horizon is a world for you to imagine, fantasise, conjecture and dare. And that’s where the beauty of the sea lies.

On some extremely sad yet captivating night I read David Copperfield’s Chapter 55 entitled ‘Tempest’ which had fantastic description of the sea as a destroyer. For hours I was consumed by the sensation that it created and kept on thinking again and again about those masses of water in that great water mass which carried everything away. Looking at waters into which you wish to drench in while being enveloped with gusts of moist wind, as roaring waves that dash against the coast blast your ears, while some unseen but potent energy makes sweeps over your body… and for one moment, just a brief moment, you forget everything but remember what is around and yet can’t recognize any of it… I do not know what it was, that I had imagined that night, and I can’t even tell how it felt. It comes back to me at some rare moments by some stimulation, as certain smell that I feel in my palate. That night my love for the seas was solemnised.

At some eternal moment during our evolutionary history, we became ‘self-aware’. We live in groups but love and mourn for the individual. We hunted in numbers but were artists in caves. Our questions are as much as external as internal. Literature is nothing but testimony of the ages of our self-awareness (as specie as well as an individual) and that’s the definition of literature that I believe in. It contains not only what we know but want to know. So we read about our achievements and celebrate our hopes and aspirations.  Indian literature is full of rivers and rains. It is a testimony of our self-sufficiency i.e., that we never needed to look beyond our subcontinent. We sang about monsoon and rivers, but never yearned for the sea. That ‘call of the sea’ that is a part of the earliest of the Anglo-Saxon poetry and which came down in English, and remained as a clarion call up till the nineteenth century, was never a part of our literature. India is a peninsular nation and therefore, this absence of sea as a force, a destroyer or a hope is quite surprising. We were a fortunate group for the nature provided us with the most fertile of lands on Earth, and therefore, we unlike Europe, never had pressing needs to make us desperately look for the ‘beyond’. So we never became raiders or in present context sailors. The closest that we came to sea was in the songs of the fishermen. Even the phenomenon of monsoon was discovered by the Arabs. If we had had bad soils with open seas around us, we would have definitely ventured into them (or crossed the Himalayas). Even our scholars never went outside India. Our sufficiency made us close and in long run a sick society. How else can you explain casteism , a system that is unique to India?

I would talk a little about caste and how absence of seas played a role in it. Caste is in the very fabric of the Hinduism, as we know it today. I am not here to debate on core principles of Hinduism and therefore defendants of the faith may rest in peace, for I am not listening to them. Hinduism as I know today, Hinduism at the time of what is called the Bengal Renaissance and Hinduism at the time of birth of our nationalist passions, was a religion structured on caste system. I have mentioned elsewhere too as to how stagnation breeds disease. We as people who didn’t move beyond our land for ages are bound to be chronically sick. People who do everything---from eating to sleeping, in strict accordance to caste dogmas, would not get into ships where the deck would force them to mingle with each other, and therefore, loose the sanctity of their caste. Therefore historians have identified specifically in Indian context a strange cultural phenomenon called, CROSSING THE SEAS. Some days back I read a text that said that ‘crossing the sea’ that embodied the fear of losing one’s caste and therefore, religion added significantly to dreadfulness of ‘kaala paani’ . In fact, our colonial masters played upon this fear of ours. While developing the penal settlements on Andaman and Nicobar Islands they banked on Indians’ fear of seas and sought to inspire such horror in us that would make disobeying them unthinkable for us.   I even read about a rebel king (who took part in the Revolt of 1857) who on learning that his death sentence had been commuted to deportation killed himself, for ‘crossing the seas’ inspired more fear in him than ‘crossing the bar’.  If you read about indentured labours you’d know about many who were duped into working overseas for even the most desperate of Indians would not agree to cross the sea and give up his caste. You might get some inkling about the role that this fear played in our society by reading about mathematician Ramanujan, who was denied a proper funeral because he had crossed the seas. Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy is based on ‘crossing the seas’ phenomenon. Read it and you’d understand what the absence of seas has done to our society.

Sea has lived in our collective human consciousness as a challenge which time and again we have tried to overcome. People have travelled such difficult waters and explored such far off lands with so limited resources that you are left in awe of our spirit. Read how humans spread to other land masses after the end of Ice Age and you’d understand what I am talking about. America was not exactly a new world but a lost one. People had known about it centuries before it was rediscovered but this knowledge was lost with passage of time. All this with just 10000 years of evolutionary history with us! Surely, what a piece of work is man!  Have you ever read any of the songs of sailors? That thirst for adventure… quest for liberty… hope for achievement and above all valiantly carrying your shroud as cloak over your shoulders … How beautiful and true to the nature of our specie! That challenge that those endless masses of water posed to us was just a minute fraction of the exponentially larger one that the immense unknown that still surrounds us does. That sense of littleness and extreme vulnerability in face of a Universe that seems to be bent on effacing us…  We still live with it. We have greatly overcome sea. But we have discovered space and sky and learnt how insignificant are we compared to their limitlessness. That explains why the terminology that was used in context of ocean navigation has been extended to that of sky and space.  We are still doing which we sought to do ages before when first of our vessels managed to cross a mass of water. Yes, it’s an eternal war that we are fighting: a never ending struggle with the nature that rejoices in killing us.

The reason why I am so attracted to sea is because it represents boundaries. Boundaries! Time and again we as humans living in this body of flesh and blood are reminded of them. How far can this physical self go?  A body isn’t just a vessel to contain you but often a cage to limit you. But then boundaries can be shifted or moved away, creating spaces where none were. We know there can be things beyond one’s body and therefore ‘transcendental’ exists in our vocabulary. I hope one day I’d experience something for which I would use this adjective. 

If you’ve something that inspires the same passions in you as sea does in me, tell me about it. If you do not have it, then search for it. Something that stimulates you to an extent that the senses fall short in number for truly capturing and taking in everything and, you desperately search for some other way to experience beyond what usually can be for you can’t let go even a minute part of it… Using your senses to the optimum level is a must for achieving knowledge about oneself.  They provide you with the best of moments to affirm to life which even a life time with metanarratives would not do. 

Meditations On Death

Gazing at the stars is one of the earliest forms of entertainment known to mankind-- yes, from as early as when we inhabited caves! On some silent nights, the noble savage must’ve looked up into those starlit skies and surely would’ve wondered with that insatiable curiosity which would eventually make him the best of the species of the Earth, as to what lies beyond that blue. Men bury their dead on earth yet throughout the ages they have looked for them in skies. He must've searched for his people too.There must have been fears of ghosts and spirits, and whatsoever supernatural his tribe might have invented to make reason of their surroundings to torment him; he would’ve pictured all of them.  Then certainly impermanence of life---his life, and the thought that what would become of him after death might’ve haunted him. Like his modern descendants, he would’ve also shrugged the thought off as it is too scaring to live with. But then he would have been restless for several minutes...

I have in many places mentioned as to how strongly consciousness has made us what we are. Man can think of the abstract, therefore he created death out of the dead. If you study the history of our civilization… turn over pages to see development of human psyche, you’d definitely come to a conclusion like I have, that Man’s life has throughout the ages been guided by the abstract not the concrete. And the greatest abstract living in our consciousness is death. Since most of my readers are very young---in early twenties and youth is characterized by a sort of arrogant denial of death, I doubt that whether you’ve really thought about death or not. Whether you have thought about it or not, death in its abstract form has lived with you since your birth.

Most of you are followers of a certain religion for atheists or the likes of them, the agnostics are very few in numbers in Indian scenario.  So if I want to address masses, I cannot escape talking about faiths. That’s why faith has been integral part of my posts. Every single religion of the world has stemmed out from death. None of the major faiths of the world assure you of a judgement in your lifetime, but definitely promise a reward or punishment in afterlife. Their philosophy is built on the premise that you’d die. Since the day of your christening or namkaran to that of your burial or cremation, there’d be a priest around, preparing and hoping for a comfortable after life for you. You grow up learning sacred verses and grow up incanting them fearing that you’d be otherwise punished by death or in death. In fact, Muslims have the concept of setting their ‘aakhirat’ right, and your greatest evils are believed to worsen it. So you see their whole lives are anchored towards death. In fact a thorough believer once told me a list of names that that defied god’s authority and consequently were killed early in life. Our belief is for the death. Most of the Indians do not think of iceberg when they talk of sinking of Titanic but that its makers were the people who challenged God. And since it is a Capital Sin and therefore, it was met with Capital Punishment, though it is a fact that none of those who died were makers of Titanic.

As I write this I am reminded of a conversation that I overheard a year ago. It would serve as a good example of how death is the guiding force of our religions, and therefore of our lives. This lady was expressing her grief for her only son had married a girl of different faith (she never accepted the couple in the family). “You sister”, said she to her listener “can at least hope that someone would baksh for you, but my daughter-in-law and son cannot even do that for my soul. I will never be in peace.” So in simplest terms, she didn’t reconcile with her son, for she would not receive right incantations after her death!

The first time I saw a dead body, I was twelve. I had sufficient intelligence about death to not to get horrified by the dead but even when people were elevating her to great heights merely because she was no more, I could not help but feel such revulsion from the sight that I never came near it even though the body was in our premises for several days. Since she was not an Indian citizen, there were many formalities to be completed, and one of it was taking pictures of her lifeless body. Later when I saw those pictures, I remember thinking how ugly she looked. Death and dead are always ugly. The only think that can make your body beautiful is the life force that resides in it. But somehow over the ages, we have glorified death to such extremes that people could even find face of the dead ‘happy’. Literature is replete with such angelic dead bodies.

As a child, I remember reading an eponymous story ‘BALGOBIN BHAGAT’. What remained in my little mind for longest was the titular character celebrating the death of his son, for he believed that his son had united with God while his poor daughter-in-law wailed with grief in some corner. I’ve already said that faiths have originated from death so it is necessary to think as to how our faiths have treated our knowledge about death. Hinduism has treated death as transitory phase, and therefore, you’d hardly find tales about long periods of mourning in its holy scriptures. But all Abrahamic religions regard death as final, and also there’s no concept of union with god. In all death is more melancholic in Abrahamic religions. I was much fond of the teleseries BOSTON LEGAL. In one of its episodes, Alan Shore asks his mad-cow stricken friend, Denny Crane as to whether he believes in afterlife or rebirth or not. Crane gave an affirmative as an answer while adding that otherwise is too great a hollow to live with. This brings me to the second major vein about my meditations about death that is impermanence of life. Since we are conscious of our impermanence and are sorrowful with the realization, we have invented or what believers would want to say, discovered afterlife. Think about it. 

I began with the noble savage because death is a savage realisation and has been passed down to the civilisation. Remember, the Stonehenge was for the dead! So you see this knowledge and brooding on death is in our genetic makeup. This morning I read a little about the collective human consciousness and how the fear of unknown rules us. What can be more unknown than what is fatal to know? So we are fearful of death. And all our philosophies are towards overcoming that fear. Yes the religion… the new fag word ‘spirituality’, yes! all to overcome that fear!

On one evening I began to think as to how exactly does one feel as that life force begins to drain out from his body? What does he feel, if he can? And above all what is usually the last thought as your consciousness dies? We do not know answers for any of these because they are few of those ever-lasting questions that are going to plague mankind for long. People who had near death experience say that they saw a kind of whiteness as they lose themselves. Most of them turned into thorough believers after such an experience as white is believed to be a divine colour. Scientists and psychologists are of opinions that as our systems successively shut down our mind sees a kind of blankness that they believe to be that reported whiteness. Up till now there has been little research on as to what exactly happens with your consciousness as you die. Death of Mind is a virgin area as far as our understanding is concerned. They say that if we somehow understand how our mind perceives death, we’d make a giant leap in understanding of our brain itself. So you see how important death as a question is for our specie!

After the discussion above, it would not come as a surprise to you that just a handful of writers have tried to write about the sensation of dying, and when I say writing about dying I mean the death of mind in the strictest sense of the word. The only noteworthy example that I can give you is of Tolstoy’s short story THE DEATH OF IVAN ILYICH. It is full of that sensation. Alfred Lord Tennyson’s CROSSING THE BAR is also a good work on death albeit it is not about sensation of dying.

Hitherto I have only talked of your own death but what about death of people who surround you? How does death of others affect one’s life? Let’s deepen our discussion now… So, what about others that die and you who sees them dying? If you read about people who try to cope up with loss of their loved ones you’d notice that all efforts are towards making senses of the deceased’s death. No matter what absurd conclusion you come down to but you must always be able to understand the loss. This is a psychological need which when left unattended leaves scars for life. I have this dictum in order to understand much of the mankind: Death is always hard for the living. Death must not be absurd else the living carry it to their graves. Just think for a moment, succumbing to some untreatable disease is still understandable but losing your people to some senseless accident, political strife or worse being used as a pawn in the state machinery, is simply too hard a morsel for human deglutition. Read Mahasweta Devi’s MOTHER OF 1084, and you’d understand what I mean by this that death ought not be absurd for the health of the living. If someone with a thriving life force dies because of poor roads, tires, cruel authorities or vested interests, it seems as if he was simply of no worth. To be negated to zero, is simply intolerable to man’s ego.

Since it is an irreversible change and mankind while been blessed with memory has also been cursed with nostalgia, so those who lose their dear ones to death search for some way to stay connected with them by whatever is left of them behind: their name, idea, belongings or as is the practice worldwide, their soul. So dead are remembered across all cultures and faiths.

For those of you who wish to really think and who think, you can never escape the enormity of death. All schools of philosophy have only moved around this question, and would continue to. If you really want to control your life by your free will, you must brood on what is death and since we are an egoistic lot, it would be incomplete a query without thinking on your death.