What it really means to be Indian

There is a reason why I usually do not discuss weighty issues here,I have no solution to offer and I do not like to see myself drawing attention writing on issues I have only heard of or read about.But,that does not mean I do not have troubling questions lingering on in my head.My last journey back home was a time for heavy contemplation.Thankfully,I was among people whose actions did not bother me all that much and I was left undisturbed in the comfort of my reticence.If you travel by the Indian Railways,you might warm up to the actuality that you ,my friend,are a citizen of a country called India.That is,if you are not still in school,chorusing the national anthem daily or are a regular fan cheering for the Indian cricket team.As the train effortlessly crawls like a snake across the country lands,trudging on from one state to another in total disrespect for borders that really do not exist,it feels more like a drive through the sanctuary of humanity.The bustle of the slums,the clamour of small temples,the quiet of endless tracts of farmland,the smoke billowing out of the occasional chimney and me,the spectator, trying passionately to work up any remote,long-lost sense of bonding that I might have with the changing world outside my window. I rediscover,India and me,its an old story:
Being born into a family that is not even remotely military or political,my introduction to the ethos of nationalism was mostly through textbooks.I was told that a certain bald ,bespectacled man was the father of our nation and the fight for freedom of our country was something to be remembered with awe and pride.It was a little difficult ,I tell you ,to believe that the sleepy nonchalance of my colony had to be earned with sweat and blood.Nevertheless,the mere sight of the national flag made oodles of patriotism appear from nowhere and swim in my little heart as if they owned the place.The earliest memory I have of representing India in some small ,sweet way was when I narrated the story of the Taj Mahal to a Russian friend who was a neighbour with a show of sentiment so rare that he must have mistaken me for some distant relative of Shah Jahan himself.But the true weight of embodying a country full of conflicting shades was felt when a friendly Australian tourist teased me asking if all Indians were effeminate,dreamy poets like yours truly and other Bengalis he had met,I swallowed my discomfort and managed to reply with a chuckle that it was unfortunate that he had not met a Sardar yet. Thinking of the futility of trying to bundle together such an amazing myriad of cultures with the strands of a shared nationhood,I was led to wonder whether India really wasn't a continent forced to behave like a country ,if the Punjabis are not as different from the Bengalis as the Spanish are from the Germans.
Also,from the very beginning,I was always bewildered at the way nationhood was practised around me.How people making a living out of partisan politics were foremost in wearing their nationality on their sleeves,At one point I was close to concluding that National days like the Republic Day and the Independence Day were grand designs ,annual checks to ensure India never lost itself totally to infighting.Another curious case which baffled me was how this self-proclaimed secular state had all its military equipment named after Hindu mythological figures. Perhaps,a nation possessing the most contrasting of realities should be pardoned such eccentricities.
Often,I opened up the atlas and felt humbled at how Vizag,my adopted hometown,barely clung to the knees of the nation and judging by how far it was from Delhi,I surmised that anything that happened at the capital must surely die down to mere bits and pieces of news till it reached us.Thus,I barely felt the force of politics and national affairs in my life (Unlike my friends from the metros who would surely have missed school on days of some bloody curfew or the other)and I reaffirmed my belief that the stories in newspapers served no more than as fodder for adult gossip.With the rise of a sense of intellect,I too brandished my bookish knowledge of current affairs to earn brownie points in debates and discussions.By late adolescence,I had mastered the art of carping eloquent on corruption,poverty ,red-tapism,communalism and other such popular Indian problems.
In addition to this,a funnier thing was happening,through an array of shallow magazines,I was being fed on the magnificence of the great American dream and very soon,I set my eyes on becoming the poster boy NRI entrepreneur,a vision of myself that I have given up,only recently.A glimpse of what I see as the last resurgence of such timorously formed ideas can be had at my post here.Besides having a good laugh,I hope you will enjoy the innocence of my youthful brashness.I have been lucky all along to have lived off on the benefits of being Indian.Not everyone shares my fortune.Certainly,not the people killed in the recent terrorist attacks,they paid the price for being Indians with their lives.
When I was two, my parents decided to migrate to the South and make it their new home.After all,they were Indians and had secured in patrimony the right to reside in any part of a sprawling landmass.Studying and playing with my friends from AP,I grew to like their culture ,relish their cuisine and love their women,all this as Bengali reduced itself to a language used for verbal communication at home.At school,my favourite and most beloved teacher was Telugu,I don't think I could have exploited any more the bond of Indianness.Father's job at the Steel plant made sure life saw no dearth on the material side,the love of mother at home and of teacher's at school left me carefree enough to build the reputation of naughtiness that I am so very fond of and permitted me the extravagance of limiting my affiliation to my family and my school.Even today,I am not completely unmindful of the privileges of studying at the Indian Institute of Technology,luxuriating in the blind pursuit of knowledge,all on taxpayer's money.
The feeling I have for this country is not as much a case of patriotism as it is of solidarity and empathy that comes with twenty years of acquaintance with any place.India ,in my eyes, has grown from the country about which I once read in my textbooks,from the nation whose struggle for independence I parroted in exams to a larger-than-life entity which has embraced me and allowed me the arrogance to look down upon its weaknesses,the freedom to have grandiose dreams and the unfettered opportunities to chase them.
I am a young man,you see.I have only begun to ruminate and have opinions.I have to stand up to the endless barrage of new complexities and the only way I can do it is by taking and switching sides,a continuous revision of viewpoints.I do not wrap myself in the tricolour but I am surely not running away from the truth of the country where I was born.I have had my brief flirtations with anarchy and willingly played soundboard to a close friend's parochial anti-India rants but at the end of the day,it is more than a passing observation for me when I see how life has an uncanny way about coming back full circle because,in some ways,I realize,I have come to love this place alongwith its bamboozling contradictions,its amusing paradoxes.

The doomed search for "I"

"I" am Ravi."I" like writing."I" am a Bengali."I" am studying to be a Mechanical Engineer.

But who is this "I" and what does it point to?Is there some entity out there that possesses the "exclusive rights" over this particular permutation of attributes which make "me" me?Do all the I's point to the same thing and if so,why?If not,does I really mean anything?Is it not just like any other letter of the alphabet except that it bears the misfortune of being the ultimate source and cause of every activity,the syllable that spews all Ego.Many would disagree and it appears that they have been in this state of constant denial since the very invention of language.The writer of this post recently read that perhaps,the oldest word in the English language is I.Each one of us,human beings is an ego-maniac to some degree.We might not tell it aloud,but we love to take responsibility for our actions,good or evil,it makes us feel alive.Life is a huge playground,we may win or loose,play till the end or get injured in between but we do not like to sit on the bench and watch things rolling past us like a movieAnd amidst all these actions,stands "I" ,like a beacon ,reminding us of how lonely we are in the choices we make and how we are always caught in the web of circumstances,trapped like 'bugs in the amber",no one ever bothering to redeem us,simply because no one can.
Being fanatically individualist,he would have been really happy if things were really the way he has just described .How wonderful it is to think that "I" am truly the center of the universe,just like how the men of the Renaissance had postulated.How wonderful it is to know that everything you ever did carries in itself the mark of your free will .That brief period in self -aggrandizing bliss did not last long.Ravi was reading random articles on conjoined twins when he discovered this shocking picture of two babies conjoined in the head.What was this,a brutal anomaly or a revealing omen?Not that he hadn't seen it before ,but this time it had brought to him the most disturbing of epiphanies.These two actually shared a brain,the temple where "I" resides and thus shared "I."They could have shared anything else,they could have shared a heart,a limb,kidneys,stomach,anything! but they shared the brain,suddenly "I",the origin of one,pointed to two ,"I"seemed to loose it's hallowed standing,it was sheer treachery on its part.How stupid he felt to be living on a delusion for his twenty long years.He felt like burning his beloved novel of adolescence-the Fountainhead.John Galt looked a living mass of lie.He felt like reaching out to Galt's heart and extinguishing the soul out of it.It did not deserve to exist,A blatant betrayal suffered at the hands of what he glorified to be the most novel of virtues-individuality.That next day,he attended all classes,had all my meals,wrote every word that came out of every professor's mouth and slept on time.He even went a step ahead and contributed most willingly to the most banal of all conversations,and took great pleasure to be classed ,even if for an instance as "normal" and "sensible".A return to docility appeared to be the surest expression of a rebellion against the Ego.It was with its soothing revelations,though.When one child in the photo grimaced when the other was pained,it betrayed to him the wellspring of human values like charity and compassion.The inevitable fact that all human beings are connected to each other just like how these two were,now stared into his face.Paulo Coelho's concept of the Universal Soul no longer sounded so mushy to him.And taking the liberty to widen the scope of Jung's ideas,it seemed the only consciousness is the collective one.

He looked back at his small personal history with heavy distaste instead of pride.Peering harder at what he thought to be some of his greatest acts of self-assertion,he saw now how each one of them can be traced back to the most trivial of incidents.If he was allowed to go back and change just one moment of his past,he was pretty sure he would end up as quiet an antithesis of what he was now.It dawned on him what the Joker means when he calls himself the agent of chaos .Actually,we all are.Just that only the Joker is aware of it. But,do not worry ,He will not turn into Joker, he will keep writing many such crazy posts.He finds a lot of solace in making literature out of his own tragedy and he thinks it is exactly what Theodore Melnechuk is trying to do in these beautiful lines of poetry:

Our puppet strings are hard to see,

So we perceive ourselves as free,

Convinced that no mere objects could,

behave in terms of bad and good.

............................

We seem to from a nested set,

with each the last one's marionette,

who, if you ask him, would insist

that he is the last ventriloquist.

May Rene Des Cartes turn in his grave.He was wrong,because "I" think he was. :)

The dying animal

Desert the keyboard,I shall
for the ink's still wet,waiting
for the birth of the poet.
First,a folded forehead smoothens,
loosens the trappings of knowledge.
Eyeballs and eyelids,
like the baby and its mother,
now like the mother and her baby.
An ever crooning television ,
serves as silence.
Have a good day!
said a man and a radio.
Daddy ,is that the radio-man
Yes son,replied the radio in the man.
Crawling past my pen,
is an ant,a lonely one
probably on a food foraging trip
like our ancestors.
Dodging the paranoid nib,
brave ant,it survives.
fortune favours the brave,innit.
As if in search for someone,
a lizard races up the wall
and so does my eye and
with a heart heavy with envy,
I leave them alone.
While a flickering tube flirts
at once ,with many a moth
a dry leaf drops suddenly
drops not like a stone,
but like a leaf
Gravity brought Newton's apple
alone to the ground,
but god guided my leaf down
give me my god back,Oh Reason,
for another god saved my chivalrous ant
and another brought my moth to the light
but the god who was greatest of all,
He gave the poet the life of
the animal man refused to be
But as he let go his pen again
he rejoined his dead brothers walking.

Waking up to life

In between a passionate draw of the bow across the strings ,Hari raises his head to claim that "this is what is classical Carnatic music".As if I care,To me,it is nothing more than noise filling up silence.
And silence appears so very exotic,doesn't it?Oh,the lost sound of silence,how intensely I crave for it.Infinite peace.Joy.A Zen-like state of pure consciousness!
But this degree of quietude is supremely impossible to achieve,or so it seems.For neither can I lull the twitter of sparrows in the veranda,or gesture the cooing peacock outside to shut up.Let alone hushing up the wailing tot in the construction worker's arms or pleading mercy to the raucous bathroom singer and it is pretty obvious that I am not the least bit interested in kicking up a quarrel asking Hari to stop fiddling with the violin.
What I need is a bomb,a powerful one at that or perhaps a bagful of grenades could also do. Everyone,everything killed,nothing left to even cry over.People dead.children dead.pregnant mothers dead.birds and dogs and cattle dead.There you go,there is the silence you wanted ,the peace you pined away for.You have got it,now stop cribbing and be happy.

My eyes blink furtively but I seem to have gone blind,my muscles twitch restlessly but I can pass off for a numb,half-dead corpse.I have lost myself in the opulence of freedom,of choice,the choice to deem one thing boring and to ignore it,to nullify another's existence and call it worthless.Blessed with a capacity to dream,I have forsaken the beauty of reality.
Don't I see that this music,this noise,the coo of the peacock,the twitter of the sparrows,the cry of the infant,all,all of them hold the secret of the enigma that is life.


I wonder if you share the same disease,the disease of delusion,of being anesthetized,of feeling half dead ....The moment,we are born,we begin to die and we are all racing towards the bucket before the ultimate kick.Death only completes the process of dying.Sure,we cannot beat death,the grim reaper awaits us all, but we can atleast stop being deaf to our own heartbeat.We need to reevaluate our existence.We cannot afford to forget that for every single breath we take in ,we are relishing the volatile gift that is life

I intended to write this two months back.Hari had been to Karol Bagh in Delhi exactly one week before the 13th of September when a fierce blast rocked the place.As he facetiously shared with me the joy of being a suitor to the capricious lady named good fortune,the unmistakable shudder in my spine did not show up on my face and I actually managed a chuckle .Looking back now,I wonder if the place was really so important.That day Delhi,Mumbai today,Calcutta tomorrow,Madras the day after....or now,right now... perhaps you are reading your last words.Perhaps you are not?then,just thank your dear respective Gods(yes,you heard it right,this is an avowed atheist telling you this),just go ,share a word or two with your loved ones,just start up on everything you planned for a future that may never come.

Hari still plays the violin. He has not only resumed intense rehearsals in Carnatic music ,he promised he would soon be able to play my favourite Godfather theme for me, and whenever,in between his playing sessions ,he feels like sharing some technical subtlety ,I,one of the biggest music noobs ever,no longer frown and just feign attention till he is finished. for I understand now how important it is for the music to go on and never stop.

The inner voice

The shadow of your mediocrity is falling over me,
I know not where I must flee,
The painful years of confusion,these are
give me my freedom,return me my obscurity.

Square peg in a round hole I will always be,
Refuse to chisel myself to roundness for you,
for this is MY sharp edge,this is MY insanity,
and this is really what makes me me.

Home

Far down in the south,lies a quiet city named Visakhapatnam.And somewhere , in some corner of the town,lies an even quieter street by which stands a house numbered 138-C and every evening ,if you are there,maybe you will find a couple talking over coffee at the balcony,their conversation somewhat drowned in the music of the birds cooing all around.


Its time I went back home.

The rule of the rules,How convention thrives.

When I began ,I had no idea what to write about.I kept asking myself if my blog has really exhausted all topics until ,pretty serendiptiously,Simon and Garfunkel sung out in my headphones-

"From the moment of my birth

To the instant of my death,

There are patterns I must follow

Just as I must breathe each breath.

Like a rat in a maze

The path before me lies,

And the pattern never alters

Until the rat dies.
And the pattern still remains

On the wall where darkness fell,

And it's fitting that it should,

For in darkness I must dwell.

Like the color of my skin,

Or the day that I grow old,

My life is made of patterns

That can scarcely be controlled"

Ever observed a procession of ants walking across the walls?From a distance,it gives you the illusion that its one dashed line stretching from end to end but peer harder,closer and you will discover its wiggling ,actually.A similar experience is when you take a thought shuttle to mars and gaze at earth.It will seem silent,dead ,till the morning prayer chorus at the nearby school will wake you up with a jolt.

Like many of my friends,I too have been intrigued by the effortless and magical and monotonous way convention thrives.I am not exactly your pipe-smoking skeptic(read Russell,if you haven't yet) and for that matter,a large part of me is anesthetized enough to adopt the very stereotypes that I am derisive of.But,this is what I see through the sometimes blinding glare of the obvious.

Self similarity of structure.Two years have passed since I first stumbled across an image of a fractal.Besides its enchanting symmetry,I always attached a mystic value to it.Mystic because I knew the image had something more to convey ,more than its awesome beauty and serenity.And now,I know what it wanted to say-When I listen to some powerful political oratory on television,I get the eerie hunch I am listening to the same guy who came to my hostel,campaigning for elections.True,the words are different and it is in another language,but I can't help but think its the same voice in a new echo and I am sure,you too will agree.Such is the nature of convention,its self similar nature,its ability to replicate itself at all levels,ensuring the smooth transition up the hierarchies of age,class and situations.

Thoughtless over-idolization of the unconventional.Having just finished Philip Roth's The Dying Animal,I take the liberty of using his eloquence to make my job easier.In the book,the narrator describes one his exceptionally beautiful but cerebrally limited female students' reaction to Cubist art-"Art that smacks of modernity leaves her not merely puzzled but disappointed in herself.She would love for Picasso to matter more,perhaps to transform her,but there's a scrim drawn across the proscenium of genius that obscures her vision and keeps her worshipping at a bit of a distance".

No wonder then that extremely ordinary individuals will so verbally harp on the greatness of a Steve Jobs speech without ever getting its real message and wear Che Guevara T shirts without any knowledge of his ideologies.For if you are incapable of making that leap of faith across the sea of mediocrity,you make up by standing in meek but fanatic worship of those who have done so-an unnecessary deification that separates you from the genius of a great idea and keeps you protected in uneventful ignorance.

The mind as the new chimpanzee.Dad once sighed remorsefully on looking at my trigonometry textbooks in class 9,something which he was exposed to,only in college.Compared to the bygone era,all graduate out of high school as scholars.Such is the humongous amount of information compressed into school curriculum.Add to that the way,internet is pushing the human race towards complete knowledge equality and you may be fooled to think that man is once again poised to begin a new era of unprecedented creativity and innovation
Not exactly.

We like to think we have evolved,that we have left our cousins in the trees far behind and to some degree that is true.But a more peculiar thing has happened,as man has reasonably succeeded in the business of a fitter survival,the new chimpanzee is not the body,but the mind.Fifty years ago,this chimpanzee could wrestle with calculus only after college.Today 's preparatory schools have enabled this chimpanzee to juggle with complex mathematics and difficult literature at as early as middle school.Imagination is what I would call the brain of the brain,the mind of this new chimpanzee .It is one thing that really makes humans what they are.Every act of creation ,from a great work of art to a novel mathematical theorem is,in isolation, an exercise in absurdity.Only later does society appreciate its beauty and its applications .And in imagination,man has not progressed much in the last thousand years,inspite of the rise of knowledge,it is still a scarce commodity.The growth in the generation of original ideas is certainly not commensurate with the rapid spread of education.Rather,too much education educates you out of the creative,absurd process.

Immanuel Kant says that convention is time-tested and good,traditional rationality is a boon and it is in our best interest to embrace God and religion.I beg to differ slightly.If one is born with the rare gift of insanity,one should channelize it into creativity(in any form) for, in the words of Camus,'Art defies that part of existence in which each individual is no more that a social unit or an insignificant cog in the evolution of history'.
Convention will continue to thrive as it always has,but time and again,someone will find the courage to question it,to flout with it,and all we can hope is that a norm,that was hitherto bigoted and meaningless ,will be replaced by another that makes our lives better and encourages creativity.