He wanted no sadness to be attached to its childhood;He loved its memories,any day of it he remembered now seemed flooded by a still brilliant sunlight.It seemed to him that a few rays from it reached to his present;not rays but like pinpoint spotlights that gave an occasional moment of glitter to his job,his lonely apartment,to the quiet ,scrupulous progression of his existence' -Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged
And a ray reached me too,reached me in my present,reached my psyche, and lit up a room of wonder,of the bliss of discovery,and gave my will the shove it needed to write a post.And so I write.
The shades of black and white are symbols of extremity.Black is the cloak thrown at all things evil.White is the robe,good things are rewarded with.It is perfectly reasonable to temper out the slight cross-cultural differences in the degree of this notion,and I am anthropologically well supported on this.But,what is noteworthy is(if for a moment we shake off the the anaesthetic of familiarity), how the fear of darkness of my game-hunting ancestors(quite some time after he came down from the trees) still pervades every sphere of modern human thought ,disguised as the distinctive emotions associated with the shades of black and white
Pardon my digressions,for I think I was talking about a ray.A ray from the past.Come sit with me and we will trace this ray back to its source.This is certainly the era of the cathode ray tube.There is a little kid sitting in his room,watching TV,his colour TV.It is not exactly clear what is widening those gullible eyes or what kind of surprise is holding his mouth open.All you know is that its some black and white thing they are showing.Black allied bombers streaking across the white sky.Or Black debris of destroyed London homes in World War II ,Or Gandhi breaking the salt-tax law taking a handful of white salt in his black hands,Or Churchill's black and white suit as he indulges in oratory.But that is not the object of our visit to this scene.To reach our object,we must go beyond his facial expressions,inside his 7 year old mind and watch silently at the machinations which led to his childhood conceptions and viewpoints."Viewpoint"-quite a classy word,suits better the brooding teenage blogger of today but spare the little kid.What he was doing was far more unconscious and far more innocent.He was making one of his zillion unconscious generalizations,part of that little bag filled with unique, stupid conclusions leading to stupider notions which every one of us remember possessing as a child.Aaah,how I treasure my little bag today.Seriously,childhood is the best time to be stupid and may people reserve all their stupidity for childhood.
So thought our young hero,that the world of yesterday was black and white only.That the universe has acquired its colours over time.And so he extrapolated the virtuality of a war footage to the reality of everything that was beyond the time scales he could handle.So,it was really true that all rivers were black in colour.That women had black lips,black eyes and black hair.That Hollywood actresses of today far overshadow any of those oldies when it comes to sexiness and beauty.That everyone in the West had either white hair or black.That trees had black leaves.And so,had you been born 50 years earlier,you would have had the most austere and monotonous experience one could ever ask for,with everything around you either black or white or with at most some degree of greyness.Waking up in a universe coloured in grey scale!What's more,he even went on to paint every World War and pre-World War emotion.He theorized ,though in extremely vague terms that ,in those days either every one was a Gandhian or like Gandhi or everyone was Hitler or a follower of his.So,the world was a really dull place to live then.Because everyone was either good or evil,just like black, or white.Thus ,the crazy ones ,the eccentric,unpredictable ones,or so to say ,"the colourful ones" were missing.Such was the nature of reality.Nature of Reality -a deep phrase and the opportune moment for another digression.
In the Critique of Pure Reason,Immanuel Kant talks of his beautiful concept of priori."That all our knowledge begins with experience,there is no doubt.But though all knowledge begins with experience,it does not follow that it arises out of experience."Kant says that there are aspects of reality that are not supplied by the senses.These he calls as priori.An example of priori knowledge is time.You don't see time,neither do you hear it,smell it,taste it ,touch it.It isn't present in the sense data that are received.Time is what Kant calls an intuition which the mind must supply as it received the sense data.And so what I described above was the a priori lens through which I looked at anything that was antiquated,anybody who was anachronistic.
And the final act.
I think I was 12 or 13 then.But I remember vividly this scene in Richard Attenborough's Gandhi (which by the way,was a colour movie)in which the paradox which had fooled me for so long,finally unweaves itself.There is a television(in the scene).The colour of the TV frame is something like brown-blue.There are people around dressed up in colourful clothes,some in uniform looking at the ensuing program where they are showing Gandhi being received at London for some round table-conference or something.And lo and behold,scenes in the television are all in that dull,blurred black and white.And the irony is worth noting.In fact,it is shocking to him and his pride in the present,his exclusive present is shattered that very moment.So,the world was colourful even then.Many years later he would come across a beautiful Calvin and Hobbes strip and all his childhood memories would come back to him as he would see how he had once owned those instincts which Bill Watterson brings out so masterfully.
Copernicus stated that the earth moves around the sun.Nothing changed as a result of this revolution,and yet everything changed.To put it in Kantian terms,the objective world producing our sense data did not change but our a priori concept was turned inside out. A Copernican revolution.For me,that childhood revelation that History was just as colourful as is the Present, was a Copernican revolution for my mind. It totally altered my apriori of the past and more importantly,whatever it stood for.The mud is just as brown as it was centuries ago.The sky was as blue as it is today.The rose just as red as it was aeons ago.Beautiful women still had those pink lips and green eyes.(here's cheers to all those beautiful grandmothers)And the world just as interesting ,diverse and just as full of surprises as it is ,today.And so as a whole new future unfolds to me,in all the brilliance of its colours,the contrast of its shades,my awe and respect for history only grows,I never forget that there is a special kind of justice I am ordained to do.There is a job I cant leave undone, The job of colouring history.
So thought our young hero,that the world of yesterday was black and white only.That the universe has acquired its colours over time.And so he extrapolated the virtuality of a war footage to the reality of everything that was beyond the time scales he could handle.So,it was really true that all rivers were black in colour.That women had black lips,black eyes and black hair.That Hollywood actresses of today far overshadow any of those oldies when it comes to sexiness and beauty.That everyone in the West had either white hair or black.That trees had black leaves.And so,had you been born 50 years earlier,you would have had the most austere and monotonous experience one could ever ask for,with everything around you either black or white or with at most some degree of greyness.Waking up in a universe coloured in grey scale!What's more,he even went on to paint every World War and pre-World War emotion.He theorized ,though in extremely vague terms that ,in those days either every one was a Gandhian or like Gandhi or everyone was Hitler or a follower of his.So,the world was a really dull place to live then.Because everyone was either good or evil,just like black, or white.Thus ,the crazy ones ,the eccentric,unpredictable ones,or so to say ,"the colourful ones" were missing.Such was the nature of reality.Nature of Reality -a deep phrase and the opportune moment for another digression.
In the Critique of Pure Reason,Immanuel Kant talks of his beautiful concept of priori."That all our knowledge begins with experience,there is no doubt.But though all knowledge begins with experience,it does not follow that it arises out of experience."Kant says that there are aspects of reality that are not supplied by the senses.These he calls as priori.An example of priori knowledge is time.You don't see time,neither do you hear it,smell it,taste it ,touch it.It isn't present in the sense data that are received.Time is what Kant calls an intuition which the mind must supply as it received the sense data.And so what I described above was the a priori lens through which I looked at anything that was antiquated,anybody who was anachronistic.
And the final act.
I think I was 12 or 13 then.But I remember vividly this scene in Richard Attenborough's Gandhi (which by the way,was a colour movie)in which the paradox which had fooled me for so long,finally unweaves itself.There is a television(in the scene).The colour of the TV frame is something like brown-blue.There are people around dressed up in colourful clothes,some in uniform looking at the ensuing program where they are showing Gandhi being received at London for some round table-conference or something.And lo and behold,scenes in the television are all in that dull,blurred black and white.And the irony is worth noting.In fact,it is shocking to him and his pride in the present,his exclusive present is shattered that very moment.So,the world was colourful even then.Many years later he would come across a beautiful Calvin and Hobbes strip and all his childhood memories would come back to him as he would see how he had once owned those instincts which Bill Watterson brings out so masterfully.
Copernicus stated that the earth moves around the sun.Nothing changed as a result of this revolution,and yet everything changed.To put it in Kantian terms,the objective world producing our sense data did not change but our a priori concept was turned inside out. A Copernican revolution.For me,that childhood revelation that History was just as colourful as is the Present, was a Copernican revolution for my mind. It totally altered my apriori of the past and more importantly,whatever it stood for.The mud is just as brown as it was centuries ago.The sky was as blue as it is today.The rose just as red as it was aeons ago.Beautiful women still had those pink lips and green eyes.(here's cheers to all those beautiful grandmothers)And the world just as interesting ,diverse and just as full of surprises as it is ,today.And so as a whole new future unfolds to me,in all the brilliance of its colours,the contrast of its shades,my awe and respect for history only grows,I never forget that there is a special kind of justice I am ordained to do.There is a job I cant leave undone, The job of colouring history.
.
.
