A Looming Orwellian Summer

There is an eerie silence that follows an explosion. Something that sounds like vacuum, piercing your ears. It lasts for a while, and in that time frame everything becomes sluggish, everything exhibits a similar kind of vacuum silence - rather than emanating sound from itself, everything looks to be sucking it inside. In that moment, if you are a victim, you seek a place where you can hide and save your life, somehow. If you are a perpetrator, you celebrate, perhaps. But if you are an observer, you think, seek justification, & look to find at least some semblance of reason even in insanity.
I am playing the third role.
I try to empathize. With both of them.

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The victims, my heart goes out for them. No one was spared. Not women, not children, not the sick housed in a hospital ward which was bombed.

I stop midway, and abhor whatever I have thought about. Over the years, these are the very people who have been silent spectators to and some even perpetrators of violence, discrimination & exploitation of my community. Their innocence is a myth because both the meek spectator to injustice and the one who commits it – are equally guilty.

Do you think the unborn child or the 10 year old boy who died in the blasts understand even the literal meaning of the words ‘discrimination’ & ‘exploitation’?

In great causes, minor damages should be overlooked. There is always some collateral damage in a war.

A war is a physical act of conflict between military arms of two rival ideologies. The pre condition for any engagement to be termed a war is that the two sides should be armed. In case one of the sides is unarmed, the engagement is termed genocide. And if you call these damages something that can indeed be overlooked, why don’t you overlook the deaths of your kin caused at the hands of the State enforcement agencies during their search and cordon operations? Why do you then term it part of a bigger conspiracy against your community?

You are saying all this because you haven’t had any hardships in your life. You were born into a safe environment, with complete financial & social security. You got a hassle free existence, which you used to get educated, get a job & lead a privileged life. All this time, you least cared about what happened around you. Now, after settling down for a comfortable life to follow, you open the newspaper, get to see a news item about some explosion somewhere, and out you come with an opinion and a twisted logic to back it up!

You have to decide on which count do you hold me guilty (and thereby sentence me to death in a bomb blast) – being an enemy of your community, or having a more privileged background than yourself. If it is the latter, as seems apparent, is it not a similar birth-based discrimination you yourself harbour that you claim to be fighting against?
And what does drudgery brings about in men? For winners, a drive to excel; for others, jealousy. And a violence that brews from jealousy can NEVER be called a crusade. At best, it could be termed a vengeance, a revenge which you take on others for your failures!

It is indeed a crusade, as it is fought with valour by wronged people against the enemies of righteousness and religion. We are fighters of the God, unafraid of any consequences whatsoever, and are ready to sacrifice even our lives for the causes we believe in. If this is not crusade, then what is it? Where else, but from God, can we get such determination and success?

How do you define valour? Is it sheepishly entering a harmless crowded area, benefitting from the basic trust that humans show towards other humans? The trust which isn’t shown towards animals, like stray leopards, which are usually killed when they enter a human locality. Or does valour lie in leaving a scooter laden with explosives in that area, while walking out surreptitiously, carefully avoiding inquisitive glances on your way out? Or does it lie in celebrating your ‘combative action’ holed in a hideout hundreds of miles away from the point of action? Or perhaps in running away and hiding from the law enforcement agencies in a manner similar to what hunted animals adopt while evading entrapment? Or -in the case of being captured- in hiring a lawyer, applying for the Presidential pardon, and in parading your parents, wife & kids in front of the media to display a more ‘humane’ sight of yours to the public?
Isn’t it so with you that the mere possibility of danger or death (to you) in your actions seems to make you a coward? Don’t your actions to evade punishment end up validating the same law and constitution you claim to fight against? And from where does the word ‘sacrifice’ come in your dictionary? Sacrifice may be of two types. One is self-sacrifice, in which man himself dies for a cause, after waging a battle. In the other, man sacrifices a loved one – akin to Abraham’s intention of sacrificing Isaac, as I read in the Bible story. You do neither. What you indeed sacrifice is an unknown human, your compatriot mostly. What ‘loss’ do you refer to while talking about sacrifice?
And for your claims to divine warrior hood, here is something which I once read written somewhere –
“There are two types of warriors-
The first fights injustice, the second creates it.
The first protects the innocent, the second kills them.
The first sacrifices himself for others, the second sacrifices others.
The first is a tree that provides shade, the second is a tree for firewood.”

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And so on goes the conversation.
Meanwhile, people keep dying. Not by old age, not by diseases - which are greatest killers in our country, but by being blown into smithereens by crude bombs in the prime of their lives. What remain are the remnants – a severed head, a torn abdomen etc. of what had once been a vibrant, lively human, with its own set desires, dreams, and its capacity to carry other, much newer, lives on its back.
And meanwhile, India’s electronic media keeps asking for citizen reporters on the blasts. “We want pictures, videos” one popular news portal says, of anything that “you see around you regarding the attack.” Implicitly, it means that if you can spot gore, why reserve it for a private viewing – let’s share it across the world so that the wounds of the unfortunate become the cynosure of the public. Pictures taken hours after a blast are impact-zero ones, and hence don’t sell. So let’s get it straight from the horse’s eye!

Following the Ahmadabad blasts, in an interview with the Gujarat Home Minister, a journalist pops the following points - “There is a perception that such blasts were expected in Gujarat after the 2002 riots. Also, add to that the dimension of most riots victims still not having got legal justice.” and “Some people argue that when riot victims do not get legal justice they feel like taking revenge.” Hats off to the lady, who did exactly the task for which the terrorists planted all those bombs! She, through her ‘insights’, echoed the very ‘logic’ that the terrorists so erringly tried to champion – that in order to make the deaf listen, you need explosions! Only, unlike in Bhagat Singh’s case(if you recognize the dialog in the previous sentence), these explosions killed innocents. Why does a discussion involving mindless, savage acts like bomb blasts needs to seek any explanation/logic for the occurrence of the same, everytime?!!
Lastly, another piece of rattling stupidity – a news portal recently published the name of an anti-national, venom spewing, (and absolutely irrational, if I may add) blog which is written by suspected terrorists, in a speculative article regarding the new names acquired by familiar terror outfits in India. They didn’t publish the link, noble souls, but the esteemed fellows don’t seem to know that naming anything controversial in a public news forum actually incites a lot of readers to seek it out, and read it through, especially in an information friendly world like ours. I’m pretty sure that the morale of the blog writer in question would have soared by quite a few degrees, seeing so many hits all of a sudden, mores so because the blog was almost inconsequential and irrelevant for most of its pre-fame life. Secondly, his ‘message’ may now actually be in a position to spread into some unpolluted but nevertheless fertile minds, thanks to the site in question. And how is the blog, the one and only update of which came almost an year back, still floating in the public domain? What have the scissor-quick honchos of the Department of Telecommunications and Information & Broadcasting ministry been doing, apart from banning television channels & ‘obscene’ films? And the only sane answer to this problem, which will eventually conceive in the minds of these ‘information controllers’ would be - and which I personally fear the most - block all blogs; similar to the traditional strategy that has been employed to get rid of all the world’s evils over the centuries.
The same strategy that seems to make sense in this mad world today - destruction– of people if they differ from you, of information if it doesn’t corroborate what you say. Simple, efficient & with immediate results. At its start you have something, at its end there is nothing. Nothing but thin air. And you don’t need any theorems to prove zilch.
An Orwellian summer somehow doesn’t seem to be so far away now.

Fawk'es' eyes!

There has been this tendency with the conspirator, this extra special orientation, towards realizing the threat probability to everything. So, as a kid, he used to look for loopholes in a shop’s security in case of a theft, when others starry-eyed the toys. The conspirator always used to wonder about how in the heavens name would the short, potbellied shopkeeper, in all his engrossedness with his account book, would come to know about the unprotected, hanging GI-Joe being quietly plucked off its lowly abode by the conspirator - for whom even the counter wall separating the Joe from the shopkeeper’s vision was well a metaphor for the Himalayas. This question lingered on until he came to know about RFID tagging, of course; but by then, the possibility of an implementation had obviously become negligible, it being inversely proportional to the conspirator’s ever increasing height.

Also, when the conspirator, in his grown up, but still uncanny self, stumbled on into the John Woo way of Indian airports, it was revelation time. He found, after doing so, that he could transport a pocketful of crude firecracker bombs in his backpack through the security checks of the national carrier, all the way to its destination. The motive behind the coup was innocent enough – the conspirator didn’t want to miss out on his Diwali celebrations, his first and hopefully the last in Andamans - but that is outside the scope of this discussion; if at all this be considered to be a discussion (It is expected that the conspirator’s young and tender age & innocuous intention will be excused). And if that was not sufficient enough, the conspirator found that he could reach as deep as the international terminal waiting area entry gate, without, repeat without, his handbag being frisked, let alone even glanced at. The handbag could have contained anything from something as harmless as Reader’s Digest to, well, use your imagination. All this analysis has been done while assuming, for obvious reasons, that the conspirator was not ‘frisked’ by any intangible sensor rays enroute to the waiting area. Its a situation that may perhaps go untested forever, unless he decides, at at a later point in time, to explore the interiors of a Tihar cell.

The last pin in the straw came when, after being enlightened ad infinitum about the grandiose & political importance of the European Union and its headquarters at the Berlaymont building in Brussels while travelling towards the same in a Belgian metro, the conspirator found, to his utter shock, that the train stops right below the huge EU edifice, and that the stairs towards the ground level(from the underground level of the metro station) lead directly to the entrance of the building through an alley flanked by its support pillars. Mind you, to the entrance of the building, not to the entrance of a compound surrounding the building. In fact, there was no compound, as a compound area is usually characterized by a surrounding wall, which, in the case of the European Union headquarters, was absent! Lo behold, there was a structure, which supposedly houses ALL of the European political elite and their attached machinery, at a stones throw from the conspirator without a S of security, or a P of the famed Belgian politie. He could conveniently go to the nearest support pillar, place a bag not containing Reader's Digests alongside, and walk away whistling, in a trademark John Woo fashion(sans the cigarette, of course), with the building going up in flames at his back. Makes you uncomfortable, doesn't it, Mr José Manuel Durão Barros?
But don't you worry Mr. Barros, he is no Guy Fawkes, you are certainly not King James I and there is a difference of seven letters between the words Belgium & England- with the difference being obviously more than linguistic.
Talking of the politie, or 'our esteemed contemporaries of the government enforcement staff' as Erle Stan Gardner called them, they happen to be be one of the most missed species by the conspirator here in Europe. Well, 'missed' may not be the right term as their absense has given the conspirator an opportunity to get into an overdrive with his element major time. That restaurant could be bluffed, that signal can be trespassed, this house could be broken into - the list is endless. After the Berlaymont surprise, only one question had come to his mind - How could Poirot hail from Belgium, of all places?
Now he knows. Practice makes a man perfect, and one needs incidents to practice the art of detection. Lots of them actually. And there is no better 'incident' incubator, than the vast, unpoliced Belgian/European hinterland.
And the only fitting reply that Europe can give to him for all the above crap is getting him arrested for criminal suggestion within 5 minutes of his publishing this post, the probability of which is........... :-)

Of writing woes, bad finishes & an unbridled romanticism!

Two unfinished posts, or drafts, on my post list & about half a dozen unfinished ideas on the hard drive made me take this decision. The decision to put overthought in the dustbin and write straight from the gut over here. I have been a terrible finisher always. And if writing unfinished poems(yup, did that back as a kid - even bordered on the mushy genre occasionally!) and articles was not enough, I have been one lousy finisher in the material affairs as well. Having struck only once in the 7 interviews I faced in my life - that 'once' being responsible for the laptop on which I type this and also for a very sumptuous meal which I had an hour back, I have always had a very hazy idea of what-it-takes. So even a childish phrase as 'pulling your pants up'(as is advised to be done in climaxes)- in my context- becomes nothing short of a herculean feat.
In my romantic delirium, into which I fall a lot while doing a lot of useless activities like writing (& listmus*), I have even contemplated about writing something about writing. You would be amused to know that I got stuck at this idea because I, while writing about it, thought about writing something about writing as a further sub-plot. That made it something like writing about writing about writing, which, as I later assessed, was not exactly what you would call a healthy activity if your mind is the host; thereby making me abandon it totally. The explanation that I gave to my heart for doing something so ghastly? 'The world is not yet ready for it ol' chap! We'll together write a masterpiece someday, and we would include it as a sub-plot in it.' Boy! was he happy!
Then there was this urge to write about the Jaipur blasts. But then, there were already plenty of them around, with their big, lofty thoughts. I, surprisingly, love to write about lofty thoughts, while I hate to confront them myself. Perhaps my heart desires all the loftiness in the world to emanate solely from me, and having to share its dreams with the other sources seems to put it off. Perhaps that is the reason (my love for loftiness, that is) why I, in a moment of intense admiration for Latin phrases, decided to choose the URL for this space as absolutumdominum. But wait a second, shouldn't the 'n' be followed by an 'i' there? Yes it should be, but the original was already taken, and I quite safely assumed the people around me to suck badly in Latin. Hell, they suck in Hindi, forget about Latin!("Guys, 'Shaurya' ka matlab hota hai bravery!" - courtesy, an anchor of MTV Wassup. Got a sleepless night due to a stomach ache that followed the guffaws.)
And boy, they did suck. No one, amongst an enormous, jaw-dropping audience (which consisted of roughly 5 visitors in the first few months) could tell out the glitch. I too, pretending to have forgotten counting beyond 5 as a counter-measure against an extremely low blogger popularity - okay you have it, an extremely low internet popularity (and I'm not going beyond that!) - decided to let it stay, until one day, the romantic delirium returned with one helluva quote, which screamed for itself to be made the headline of the blog -
'Connoisseurs of Latin maybe a touch disappointed about the missing 'i'; but let me assure you, that 'I' has been stolen to be sprinkled over every nook and corner of this space!'
I was bowled over by myself with this one, and it took some time to regain the footing as the pendulum keeps coming back in such instances. It hits you, you smile, and soon it returns, hitting you again. The cycle continues, and takes some time to subside - and with it subsides your smile of self-admiration!
During these moments of intense contemplations, which are usually the moments of romantic deliriums, another queer thought had struck my head. It was again influenced with the extremely low level of visibility that this space enjoys. Well, the thought was about - to put it simply and while maintaining a straight face- a post-apocalyptic scenario in which all the literature of the world has been destroyed. Every single letter totally erased from everywhere. All traces of written text, symbolic or graphical, totally wiped out. Only one piece remains. Yes, you guessed it right - this blog!( This is my space, remember, so the one that remains can never be yours!). What would happen then? I would be a legend, father of literature for the future generations. The greatest writer ever, because, frankly, I'll be the only writer ever - in the eyes of the future generations at least .
Wow! what sweet revenge would that be! On the other hand, it could be a very disheartening experience if the advertisements on or to this page still walk away with the Nobel for literature. (Shivers!)
As I said, just a thought!
Anyways, I think thats enough deliriums for an insomniac for now.
Insomnia and romanticism somehow don't go well together!

* listening to music

That Nasherkan Legacy

(Ahem(clears throat)...Ladies & Gentlemen, I hereby assume great pleasure in announcing that I have completed my first ever work of fiction. It is full of amateurish glitches and inconsistencies, but it is nevertheless mine, and, as a proud Father, I firmly stand by it. I also got it published on Sffworld here, and would be waiting for some frenzied criticism from all quarters. Brickbats ahoy!)

Odin watched in horror as the sweat drop fell to the floor, splattered against the surface & disintegrated into numerous droplets. For hours he had been guarding against this very event and now just a short nap had undone all the hardwork. The alarm soon reached its crescendo, and even in midst of the cacophony, he could hear the clamour of machine parts down the tunnel. He had about 5 minutes before the installment’s tracker application pinpointed his location in the maze, and another 30 seconds before he got executed through a high voltage jab sent at the corner where the sweat drop was detected – his corner. The security system always worked this way, ruthlessly terminating any attempt to transgress the boundary of the installment. It had been a bad idea to escape, right from its conception, but still Odin wanted to take his chances. After all, a chosen death is preferable to an inflicted one.
It all started off with a simple game of Nasherkan. It was in this very installment that he had challenged Oni. Odin had always been a good player, but more than confidence in his skills, it was a sense of adventurism that had made him challenge Oni, the reigning champion of Saarga multiverse. In his hot blood, even Oni’s dark & mysterious ways hadn’t deterred him. An uproar was expectedly caused when Oni put down his conditions, as was customary for the challenged. The game was to be played locked out in this installment and the loser was deemed to be terminated. There was no way out, he contended, when the clash is for the title of ‘Champion of Saarga’. These conditions were ratified by the Council, Nasherkan’s regulatory body, and it was decided that all the other rules would be kept intact.
The game of Nasherkan was played in a two player mode in Saarga (though in other multiverses, there had been instances of multiplayer games too). The game was both virtual and physical in nature - virtual for the players, as they viewed everything in the game with Nasherkan headgear, and physical because the actual action was performed physically through the simulation controllers. The game’s playground was a small spherical ball known as Terra, portions of area of which were divided equally between the two players, the division being sporadic like polka dots, as per the player preferences. The players were then expected to create their own ‘growths’ – patterns of quasi-intelligent characters and surroundings, collectively known as societies, with the help of the simulation controllers, placed at a short distance from the Terra, which was enclosed in a glass chamber. A Ring of Ignorance (ROI) was also established around the Terra, so that the growths remain concerned with themselves. These growths were reared to be antagonistic towards each other and, in the ensuing warfare, the player whose growth got eliminated first was deemed the loser. Thus, the wholesome objective of the game was total annihilation of the rival growth, and any steps taken for building, and maintaining growths were mere means to the end. The moves were made in real time and could be made even simultaneously; and the players had full freedom to manipulate their growths in any way they wanted. None of the players were to directly expose themselves to their or their rival’s growths, but, with the help of the simulation controllers, they effectively ‘played God’ to their societies. The Terra to be used was to be picked from a heap of lumps from the installment itself, as per the rules of Nasherkan. After a read-out of this full charter of rules, a bluish lump was chosen as Terra and the game was on.
It was fascinating to see the two of them play – one a hardened champion, the other a courageous rookie. Both went about their jobs with utmost dexterity, working out patterns, surroundings, & characters effortlessly with the simulation controllers. In the initial part there was not much to do. The players had mutually decided to increase the time rate on Terra to 2.3 Billion of the rate on Saarga, so that the game could be over in just under 2 days time. Initially, both of them went about creating characters with little or no intelligence. As they had put in tough surroundings around these characters, the societies became more engrossed in survival than in countering each other. As a result, no evolutionary version increase was being achieved. Without a version increase, the growths were lesser likely to fight, and there was the danger of the game ending in a tame draw. So, both the players agreed to wipe off everything, and make a new start to the game. After a brief lull which followed the wipe-off, the players moved on to create their most effective foot soldiers – the Naras.
The Naras were totally different from the characters that had been created till now. For the first time, the most effective weapon (MEW) of a character race was not physical. In fact, the Naras were one of the weakest characters on the physical scale. But they were provided with an unparalleled intelligence as their MEW. This set them apart and changed the whole approach to the game for both the players. Instead of the earlier skirmishes & petty fights between the growths, now planning and strategy came into the picture.
While being almost perfect miniature copies of their creators’ race (as a tribute) in physical terms, the Naras were engineered to be far different on the cognitive scale. The people of Saarga had long renounced violence (it existed only in virtual games like Nasherkan now) and related grade II attributes, whereas the Naras were made to be suspicious, quarrelsome and inimical towards each other, the society, and the surroundings. This constant sense of enmity in Naras was crucial to the game’s outcome, and was thence mandatorily incorporated in them by the players. As they were provided with the superior most intelligence on Terra, with its help they gradually spread over to each and every corner of it, and became the ruling class – perfect for the battle setup of Nasherkan. But because of their enhanced intelligence and resulting inquisitiveness, it was difficult for the players to maintain the ROI around Terra which had been easy to maintain in the case of the prior characters. Ever since their conception, it was not uncommon to spot a Nara looking up towards the pseudo-sky (which had been created along with the Naras, as a key component of the ROI) with a puzzled expression on its face. This increasing curiosity made the Naras attempt research in a major way, and, though this was desirable to the players as far as the research was military, it was anathema for them if it turned non-military. For any non-militaristic research had a chance, even though a miniscule one, for overcoming the ring, and such a scenario would have resulted in immediate termination for both the players. Also, both Odin & Oni wanted more control over their ‘foot soldiers’ – who, given their intelligence, had a very high chance of going the peaceful Saargian way. So they gave the Naras’ cognitive scale a loophole in the form of superstition & herd mannerism. As direct contact was not allowed in Nasherkan, this was the perfect channel to control the Nara mind. And with its help, every major attempt at non-militaristic research was vanquished by the players by turning the majority against a handful of researchers. However, a little quasi research was allowed to be carried on, as a part of the ROI.
After all, ignorance too has to be taught in order for it to remain ignorance.
In order to exert their influence and strengthen their growths, the two used entirely different modus operandi. Odin relied more on symbology & myth-dispersement, mostly extolling grade I attributes in filling up the Nara scale with an unwavering faith and commitment to Odin. The approach was direct and, given the natural Nara affinity to revere grade I attributes - much akin to the Saarga people - was convincingly successful too. Hordes and hordes of Naras joined the ranks of the Odin society, and Oni’s growth started looking hopelessly outnumbered. The Nara design had been a joint venture between the two players and both had retained an equal number of Naras at their conception, but the influence of Odin slowly proliferated even the highest Onian Nara ranks, and an exodus of sorts towards the Odin side happened. Odin, naturally buoyed by this success, went about creating societies with the same theme, and made his many symbols to be worshipped by each one of them. Whatever that belonged to Oni was labeled as an arch enemy, and was deemed to be attacked on a spotting. Grade II attributes, another Oni domain, were ostracized and shunned, and thus that every possibility was thwarted which could have possibly become an attempt by Oni to access & influence a majority of Naras.

The only catch was that Oni had no such attempt in mind.
Oni was a Champion of Nasherkan. And Odin forgot that. Oni’s technique was never confrontational. Instead, it was better off for him to have his growth reduced to miniscule proportions as it made detection more difficult and even resulted in collateral damage to his adversary in form of fake encounters. But what Oni conspired was something far more sinister and damaging that a collateral damage.
The two growths fought a slow but steady war for most of the time. Sometimes the conflict was made to reach a crescendo deliberately by Odin, so as to get a decisive verdict sooner. War I and War II were the result of such efforts. The wars were a treat to watch, and on more than one occasion, it looked as if the game would be over in a few more Saargian microseconds, but at the last moment, due to one glitch or the other, the wars could never be decisive. It was a glitch to the neutral and the Odin eye, but it was a maneuver to the Oni eye. He believed in slow and steady eating up of the Odin growth as it spoilt itself with its own grandiose & imagined achievements. With each war, which Odin seemed to have won, he actually became weaker. Soon, it dawned upon some Odinian Naras that war itself could be the root cause of their downfall - if it ever happened - and they decided to counter it. And it was here where Odin made his biggest mistake of the game. He paid no heed to the non-militaristic viewpoint of his able and intelligent growth yet again, and chose to eliminate the section of Naras which had gone the anti-war way. What could have been a winner strategy was curbed even before it could materialize into something substantial. The inevitable War III happened, decimating all Nara population with it, barring one – an avatar which Oni had judiciously kept out of the war zone. Avatars were the Nara versions of the players, which were totally controlled by the players themselves, and were another way of controlling the growths. This avatar had been the major disperser of grade II attributes into the Naras as it roamed around even in the rival growth without arising suspicion. But just prior to war III, it was safely tucked away by Oni, only to be resurfaced at the war’s end, proclaiming the Onian victory. Odin had been caught totally unawares by this, as he had expected complete annihilation. Had that been the case, the game could have been continued with creating new characters and societies. But now, it was all over.

The voltage jab came as soon as this thought process of Odin got over; it was often said in Saarga that all the moments in a person’s life flash before his eyes before he dies, but somehow it was only the fast forwarded memory of this game that touched his eyes. After that, it was only white light as Odin of Saarga was terminated as a prisoner trying to transgress the boundaries of the installment.

In Heaven, meanwhile, God punched his palm in exasperation as he suffered another setback while playing the game of Nasherkan with Lucifer on that lump called Saarga.

An Arthouse Interpretation...

Well, I wanted to pen this down before the worldly opinions & factors malign my pure thought yet again. So trying something different now – writing what I felt after watching the movie Khoya Khoya Chand about half an hour back. Three scenes stick to my mind indelibly-

1. The male lead, Zafar, is directing his debut movie. He chooses the story to be that of his own life – a childhood and a youth ridden with angst against his casanova father. In the climactic scene that he shoots, the actor in this movie – which is actually a screen avatar of Zafar himself, asks his father something that he wanted to ask all his life, but could never do so until now. The sincerity and the painfully curious, screaming-for-an-answer-look is shown to be shared by both the actor and the director Zafar, before and behind the camera respectively. Zafar is so emotionally involved in filming this scene that, for him, the difference between reel & real ceases to exist. He looks earnestly, searchingly towards the father, and, in the process, forgets to ‘cut’ the scene.

This scene shows what art means to an artist. Art is not only self expression. It is also a medium to attain salvation for him. It gives him a chance to rollback his life, change things he wished he could – even if those changes are on something as mercurial as a celluloid. A piece of art can be understood cent percent only by its creator for this very reason; it is a self constructed code language, a sort of personal diary, an expression which is, to a certain extent, directed towards himself. A commercially viable piece of art would be directed more towards the audience and would have practically no personal connection with the artist, while a non-commercial one would be directed almost totally towards the artist himself – being as unintelligible to others as scribblings in a personal journal are. The difference between these two lies totally in the target audience that they have.

2. Zafar’s movie’s premiere is greeted with yawns and other general displays of disinterest. Watching, a critic asks Zafar, who is sitting besides him, his opinion on the whole debacle. Zafar watches him broodingly for a moment, seeming ready to burst out in exasperation any second. He does burst out, albeit into a big, ear-to-ear grin.

This scene is a continuation of what I said above. After making a personal-journal piece of art, and understandably not being understood by anyone, there is nothing left for an artist to do but to smile. There may be two reasons for this smile – One, he smiles at others’ ignorance. In a mocking way, he may consider himself to be ahead of his time. He may consider others dumb because they couldn’t understand his metaphors. Two, and this one is difficult to explain. The artist is so deliriously submerged in his art that he doesn’t give a damn about anyone’s opinion on his work. Visually, the situation looks like a sculptor who, after creating his sculpture, has settled down to worship it, as we worship our idols.

And, well, there also are a few, who, with their ingenuity, understand this beautiful but abstruse piece of art, and end up smiling too, albeit for reasons entirely different than those of the artist!

3. Zafar, who had left the industry and his actor girlfriend after the failure of his film, has returned after many years – in order to make a comeback, only to find that his ex-girlfriend has become disillusioned & alcoholic since. While talking to his friend who has since taken care of the girl, about her condition & his reasons for coming back, he says, while looking straight at the girl, who is immersed in an intoxicated slumber –

‘Kya karein bhaisaab, ab in se duur bhi to nahi raha jaata’.

I found this to be swashbucklingly brilliant. The identity of ‘in’ here, in my opinion, is two pronged. He is referring to the two things which were irresistible, and probably irreplaceable in his life –

i)the film industry: An artist can never run away from his art. No matter how much he may try, whatever else he may dabble in, or however disillusioned he may become, he just can not throw his art out of his existence. Perhaps this is the difference between an artist and a non-artist. The commoner has taught himself since childhood that an unproductive part of your being should be cut out from your existence. There is no reason whatsoever for retaining anything so unworthy, so unusable – and so, he adapts himself to any vocation that will satisfy his material wants. An artist can’t do that. He is a person who will retain that pencil with which he has practiced all year long for the final test, even though it may have reduced to such a small size that it is practically unusable.

ii)the girl: This excessive sentimentalism is evident is his human relationships as well. Even well after they end, he can perhaps never get over any of them. Just as he can’t cut away his creative organ however unrewarding it be, he similarly can’t do away with the people he loves. But because his self-expression would be as abstruse as his art, he would be constantly uninterpreted (or worse – misinterpreted), giving way to his failures in these relationships.

So these were some riveting moments from the movie. But watching this movie added more fuel to a greater debate raging inside me for quite sometime now. This debate concerns itself with the relevance of art today. Do we really need it? Does it represent a useless outcome of human creativity? Does it not, by the virtue of its existence, and by its propensity to hypnotize minds, waste human time and effort? These questions can be better understood if we take a peek into what we aim to head towards. Human upbringing is all about mechanizing. Since childhood, we are taught discipline, laws, doctrines, manners, etc. and are constantly conditioned to become ‘civilized’. The rules stated above are imbibed in every inch of our existence, and are generally viewed as prerequisites for living in an organized society. Any deviation from these is regarded as abnormal and unacceptable. Our ideal existence looks, thereby, to be chillingly similar to a machine part. We are intended to be the well oiled, formulaic & unwavering pieces of a larger machine (visual imagery*: a clock mechanism; also a military parade for the broader sense) known as the human society so that it may run ad infinitum. In such a pursuit, art is necessarily an unneeded enterprise.

And art becomes necessary just because of a need to demechanize. Both its construction & understanding involve the uninhibited side of human nature. A side which is perhaps the sole factor distinguishing us as human beings (to quote a character in The Matrix Reloaded – ‘To deny our impulses is to deny the very thing that makes us human’). The keywords here are ‘uninhibited’, ‘free’, ‘creative’, ‘romantic’, ‘impulsive’, ‘un-dogmatic’, and, to a certain extent, ‘illogical’ – with the definition of logic which one chooses making the difference here. And it is these words which represent the basic tenets of the concept of art. Art involves a skill which is almost totally impulse based. Its outcome is an expression which is not externally controlled or dogma-resultant, but is free. A shackled expression can therefore never be called art. Art is inherently iconoclast, because human spirit is inherently unrestricted.

And therefore art is needed - to give an expression to the demechanization. By giving an output to this unrestricted side through the medium of art, we keep some semblance of that human element alive in ourselves in this fast changing world.

‘Of all lies, art is the least untrue.’ ~ Gustave Flaubert.

Pretty apt, eh?

* Refer to the previous post for more elucidation on visual imagery

The Vagaries of a Senile Mind!

There is a certain visual imagery associated with most of the intangible forms that we come across or think about in a lifetime. What that might be for the particular forms differs from person to person. Like the word 'Envy' comes about as written in green & wrapped in ivy in my mind whenever I think of it; 'Olympics' always bring about a track & field event's image, the font colour of ‘Ice’ is always white, ‘Angry’ written on a text pad somehow always looks angry, and so on & so forth. But the manifestation of number '25' for me, oddly enough, is not shackled to such mundane avatars. Envisage a Twentieth Century Fox movie’s opening graphic, replace the luminescent studio name by ‘25’, add some firecrackers to the background, and increase the glitter quotient of the whole spectacle by infinity.
Yes, THAT grand.
This romance with ‘25’ started perhaps when there was a bash at my place to celebrate the 25th wedding anniversary of my ol’ folks. That’s when I got to know that completion of 25 years of togetherness is SOME thing, the numeral 25 being the key in the sentence, rather than the word ‘togetherness’. Mind this - had it been 24 or 26, the celebration would have been dampened, and the statement’s worthiness would have reduced to that of a news report in Dainik Sandhya Prakash claiming itself to be a cryptic message from an alien civilization. The interest waned for a while when I got obsessively interested in cricket statistics - especially the batting averages - and has waxed ad nauseam since I turned 25 three weeks back!
Suddenly there was a difference in me, over a period of 24 hours, as if I had jumped across a major crevice in time space (which I obviously had, except for the exaggerating ‘major’). The hair seemed grayer, the shoulders seemed slouched, & the skin seemed saggier (the word ‘seemed’ was zeroed upon after a later, more relaxed examination). If the physical transitions are any indicator of the colossal aftereffects that followed this event, the mental ones were even more telling. An uncomfortable thought that the two hands of every clock around the world were joining hands in a conspiracy against me at precisely 12’oclock during the night of 13th September made me panicky. As the Sun crept across the globe on that fateful night, I could envisage those zillions of clock parts in millions of clocks working in tandem in order to rob me off my {X: X is equal to a thing which you lose when you turn 25 – and it is not YOUTH, you teeth barer!}.
25 is an interesting age to be at. It is where you start becoming unquestionable. After years of asserting your independence of opinion, it is here when you finally start getting your due. You are THERE- with that ‘Adult’ tag firmly in place now. The interesting part? You don’t want it now! Why? Because it doesn’t matter, and what does matter now is, again, heartbreakingly, out of your grasp. When you were a kid, as Kevin Arnold said in ‘The Wonder Years’, you were a bit of everything. You wanted to be that everyone who fascinated you. Before I knew it, I wanted to be a scientist, a fighter pilot, a computer engineer, a computer hacker(even before I knew what that meant), a cop, an intergalactic voyager(under the guise of a NASA astronaut, of course),a rockstar, and last, but not the least – an international sportsperson! As being any of these was quite improbable at that young age, I settled down cozily to dream of a fairy tale future – which included rescuing the world thrice from invading aliens, developing the world’s deadliest & longest-ranged ICBMs, revising anything Newtonian, playing electric guitar to the biggest sold-out audience ever, & hitting 6 sixes in a row in cricket. The play was written, the stage was set, and the only thing that I had to do now was to set a time for the show to begin. So I chose 25 – the age when you are supposed to be big and burly and spitting off even the minutest traces of adolescence (selection criteria – “gosh! People are married off in that age!”). By that age, I was supposed to be at least one of those great figures mentioned above. The ‘sportsperson’ dream ended while growing up and watching contemporaries making it; the pilot dream ended in one Pilot Aptitude & Battery Test, the rockstar dream ended in oodles of lethargy, and the causes of the rest of the debacles are unmentionable in a civilized discussion. Our childhood dreams, I often think, are like a pendulum’s swing – they start with a huge sweep between two very different and even contradictory ambitions (what else should a desire to be an astronaut and a rockstar be termed?) - covering a wide range of wants in between, and, with the passage of time, get smaller, slower and more & more limited as that sweep does, and end eventually with a stillness which signifies our one and only unipolar ambition in the end – to live, somehow. This ‘end’ in my case, it seemed to me, had come with this birthday. Hence, the dismay!
Well, my chagrin notwithstanding, the Sun did creep, the clockwork did tick, and before I knew it, there I was, hands flung in air, eyes redefining the term ‘deliria’, and chest thrust forward – more due to a push, rather than a self-thrust - breaking that ribbon which has ‘Gotcha’ written over it! (That, again, is a visual imagery associated with the event)- with the identity of the addressee for the word ‘Gotcha’ being a matter of high & wide speculation.
It is the beauty of this eventuality that saved me.
Because, in any case - whether the age ‘got’ me, or I ‘got’ the age - the finality was that I was over that threshold. And this threshold is like a hill top or a plateau you encounter in midst of a long and tiring journey. You climb it, stretch your arms, breathe in fresh air, look around, and then look back at the long way that you have traveled to come this far. You see that smooth initial portion of the road that you started your journey on – believing it to be one hell of a joyride all the way; you see that little thorn ridden patch of the road that ended your honeymoon but which you could still navigate through, unscathed in the end; you see those rollercoaster like sections of the road, full of crests & troughs which you journeyed through with a lurch in your stomach, and a twinkle in the eye; you see those hairpin bends which made you slow down in spite of you prior breakneck speeds - this slowing down being attributed usually to fear, and sometimes to respect; you see those wreckages of cars you passed by - silently swearing that you would never let this happen to yours, only to end up narrowly missing a crash; you see those lifts that you gave to strangers – and how close you came to being robbed by them; you see those torrential rains which made going on hell for you, but you still admired the cleansing they did for your then-dirty car! And then, when you see all that, you realize that the drive was indeed a joyride all the way, that honeymoon actually never got over, because in the end, and on that hill top, you were still there, with your very own car, your very own road, and more starry eyed for the path ahead than you were when you started it all!
So, I finally did what should have been done – wiped that brow, snapped those fingers, and got on with that drive!



PS - Pray to your Lord Almighty that you are not around when I turn 50!

Cooling Illeya!

That during rounds of post-ethanolic discussions with co-conspirators, a lot of beautiful and unadulterated thoughts diffuse, is a no brainer. But, when the thoughts tend to encompass burning social issues like the relevance of heat in an average Chennaiite's day, and, regretfully, night - a jaw dropping display of human agony & helplessness emanates from the faces of the tortured souls. Usually everybody - and that includes the normally sedate ones - howl, at the top of their voices, and with such conviction that would give any dog enough belief to file a copyright protection suit. But sometimes, the conspirators get into a more creative mood. Like suggesting taglines for the 'Welcome to Chennai' boards on the serpentine highways that lead unsuspecting souls to this 'melting pot'(no, thats not being said in the usual literary sense, but in a more literal sense). A tag line which may have a global appeal, but which may strike a personal chord. Which could, in a couple of words, bring out the spirit of the city. Which could make the dwellers smile - either wistfully, as in the conspirators' case, or nostalgically, as in the locals' case. And thus, after tremendous contemplations & deliberations, the conspirators finally come out with the most apt one.
"Cooling illeya boss!" - replies the irate general store owner - while scratching his belly, when queried about the lukewarm status of a 'cold'-drink bottle he has recently uncorked. Notwithstanding the fact that the bottle in question has been, thankfully for the eye of the customer, withdrawn from a cooler that supposedly brings down the temperature level of liquids to near-zero levels.
"Cooling illeya boss!" - replies the irate liquor salesman - while scratching his belly, when queried about the warm status of a beer bottle - usually being one of the many international brands of beer that Chennai has produced - Vorion 6000, Kalyani, Bullet, etc - which he has withdrawn from, you guessed it right, a cooler. That he gives a puzzled look when asked about the availability of KF Strong - similar to the look that is given by liquor salesmen in Bhopal when asked about the availability of Budweiser - is a different issue altogether.
The list goes on, with people of different capacities & customs spending their regular days chanting this phrase and scratching their bellies. God must have recovered from a severe bout of hypothermia when he was about to create this city. So he made heat a religion here. He created the four seasons here as - hot, damn hot, sweltering hot, & warm - in that order from Jan to Dec. And whatever that was left outside the scope of climate, like the human brain, he filled up with an unwavering thermic faith. A faith so strong that even the technological innovations like refrigerators & air conditioners couldn't break. To keep up with the changing times, some enterprising folks like those mentioned above did adopt these inventions, but found a brilliant way out - they kept the coolants shut. Hence the lukewarm cold-drink & the warm beer.
Indeed, heat manifests itself in various antics of Chennaiites. For instance, the plates in a restaurant to which a few fellow conspirators once went to, were warm. The reason for them being so, was, apparently, not environmental - as the restaurant was air conditioned, but was a result of a manual deliberation. The reason, of course, was incomprehensible to us non-believers. This was after the conspirators had refused a tempting offer to drink boiling Black Knight beer at a place cooled by table fans. Also, the fact that in addition to having the regular tap, most water-'coolers' here have an extra tap to pour out warm water too. A conspirator once suggested that commodities which have to be served cold, like icecreams(thankfully!), should come with a statutory warning especially for Chennai - "Consume with caution/Keep out of reach of subjects with a weak heart". An insignia portraying a frostbite would serve as a perfect deterrent for the faint hearted but still-maverick gourmands.
Another specialty of this place, which is also a brilliant attempt by the residents to preserve tradition and prevent cross mingling of cultures, is the custom of inequitable distribution of heat. This is one custom which makes the city mindblowingly different from the 'other world' - as they call it. So, your finger bowl will necessarily hold cold water, while the drinking water in the accompanying jug would be sure to set the mercury levels rising. Your 'Hot' Dog will be invariably cold, while the dishware, for some godforsaken reason, will be hot. 'Heating up the wrong things' - as it is called in the conspirators' theory, but truly being a custom that goes a long way to show this city's utter thermic devotion and its penchant for isolation.
Sweat inspiring stuff, this!
I'll wind up with writing a definition for this beautiful phrase, hoping that Oxford may consider it one day.
cooling illeya [kool-ing il-ā-yuh] adjective
Phrase describing lack of cold in an object that should otherwise be served cold; an unnatural state of being, involving the dimension of temperature
ORIGIN : 'cool' - Victorian English; 'illeya' - Tamil (meaning - 'do not have')
REMARKS : The adjunct 'Cool' used here may not be considered in any way as being of American English origin. The phrase, though, may be used as an antonym for the word 'Cool' as it appears in American English.