Category: Flawsophy

  • Travel Gems

    Paul Theroux’s “The Tao of Travel” was a goldmine of perspectives on the subject. While I did write a review on GoodReads, I really didn’t stuff it with quotes as I would have liked. 🙂 But since this is more of a chronicle, I can afford the liberty here.

    “You go away for a long time and return a different person – you never come all the way back.” Paul Theroux

    “Travel is flight and pursuit in equal parts.” Paul Theroux

    “I think I spend more time thinking about what I don’t want to take with me: assumptions, iPods, cameras, plans, friends, (in most cases) laptops…… expectations.” Pico Iyer

    “Unfortunately, the sort of individual who is programmed to ignore personal distress and keep pushing for the top is frequently programmed to disregard signs of grave and imminent danger as well. This forms the nub of a dilemma that every Everest climber eventually coms up against: in order to succeed you must be exceedingly driven, but if you’re too driven you’re likely to die.” Jon Krakauer

    “My own feeling is that city dwellers invent the cities they dwell in. The great cities are just too big to be comprehended as a whole, so they are invisible, or imaginary, existing mainly in the mind.” Paul Theroux

    “Travel is one of the saddest pleasures of life.” Madame de Staël

    “I tend to think that happiness is a particular time in a particular place..” Paul Theroux

    “It sometimes seems to me that if there is a fundamental quest in travel, it is the search for the unexpected.” Paul Theroux

    until next time, wanderlust

  • What remains…

    Kathavasheshan means ‘The Deceased’, and it’s one of my favourite Malayalam movies. In my mind though, I split it in a different way (inaccurately) – what remains of him after the story. I watched it on TV after a long time. Meanwhile, such was the magic of Devdutt Pattanaik’s Jaya that I used the ad breaks to continue my reading. Though I consider myself fairly well versed with the epic, the book was an eye opener at many levels – new interpretations and back stories, philosophy, and the narration that immensely adds to the tale’s relevance.

    After the Mahabharata, as Yudhishtira is conducting the Ashwamedha and is called upon to settle a dispute, Krishna asks him to postpone his decision by 3 months as the situation would undergo a sea change, because 3 months later, the Ashwamedha will conclude and the Kali Yuga will begin. Only a quarter of the values instituted by Prithu at the dawn of civilisation will survive. Man will live for pleasure, children will abandon responsibility, woman will be like men, men like women. Humans will copulate like beasts. Power will be respected, justice abandoned, sacrifice forgotten and love ridiculed. The wise will argue for the law of the jungle. Every victim will, given a chance, turn a victimiser. Values. Dharma. As the epic explains, dharma is not about winning. It is about empathy and growth. Dharma is work in progress, and cannot be seen in the isolation of one life.

    (movie spoiler) Kathavasheshan‘s protagonist is a sensitive person who has empathy for everyone around him. The story begins with his suicide and his fiancee’s search for the reason. The story progresses through the perspectives of various people whose lives he has touched and his effect on them. It finally turns out that it is this very empathy and his inability to live in a society that allows the Gujarat atrocities to happen that is the reason for his suicide. (there is a personal connection for him too)

    It led me to wonder if the manifestations of the Kali Yuga were such that they could not be fought within the ‘constraints’ of dharma, and escapism was the only way.  It is only a movie and a character, but I’d like to think that he remains – in the minds of the people he touched – and continues his growth and the pursuit of dharma in his next life.

    until next time, the post continues.. 🙂

  • Halve nots

    During N’s last visit to Bangalore, the final minutes of our conversation was around rights and wrongs. Zeros and ones. Black and white. At some point in our evolution, we created halves – half rights, grays. Who’s to say your gray is grayer than mine? It becomes subjective, contextual. For argument’s sake, we could say that rights and wrongs themselves are such. But each time we make that gray decision, we know, and we pretend not to notice that little voice.

    Many years ago, as I sat eating an ice cream at the Cream & Fudge Factory in Koramangala (it no longer exists) an old man’s eyes met mine for a few seconds. He probably didn’t mean it, but as I took in his frayed but neat clothes, and his gaze that somehow conveyed that he couldn’t afford what I was having, I was suddenly struck by the unfairness of it all. These days, I wonder if I just imagined it all, and it was just my sub conscious conveying something to me. In any case, it’s like that subtext that once is known, is impossible to clear.

    We have to live, and make a living, N said. He was kind, and gave me various ways to assuage my feelings of guilt. But every time I make a choice – across life’s various scenarios – an extravagant meal, a new pair of jeans, a movie – I know I’m watching myself, and judging. It is easy to allow myself things, but who’s to say where the allowance ends. How objective can I be about myself? Every time I ignore that little voice, I add to the imbalance, blur the lines in my own eyes. A life has to be lived after all.

    until next time, live long and proper..

  • A momentous truth

    Joydeep Roy Bhattacharya’s “The Storyteller of Marrakesh” is not among my favourites, mostly because it didn’t deliver what I look for in  a work of fiction. But I’m a fan of it for a different reason – there is prose in it that will haunt me for a long time.

    The book’s narrator begins the tale with the statement that there is no truth, because the moment it is revealed, it is transformed into one of many possible opinions. A few pages later, he says “Our imagination spins dreams; memory hides in them. Memory releases longing; the imagination waters the rivers with rain. They feed each other.“

    In terms of memory augmentation, despite the best documentation, I’ve felt many times that there are moments that have not been captured fully, or perhaps not captured enough at all. A presence that is felt, but cannot be captured. It is humbling to realise that acts which we lay importance to, moments which we considered precious, will be forgotten altogether or remembered in a different way from what actually happened, not just by others, but by us too.

    Much later in the book, a character shares a wonderful story, “This professor while addressing a large audience on the subject of beauty, asked that a piece of ambergris be passed from hand to hand until, by the time it reached the last person at the back of the massive hall, it had crumbled away to nothing. But the entire hall smelled of ambergris, and every person there had been touched by its essence. The professor concluded his lecture at that point, stating that he had nothing more to say on the nature of beauty.”

    ..of life, I would say. The smell of ambergris would drift between memory and imagination. If someone found words to describe it, it would exist in the imagination of the reader, but probably in a much different form than it actually was. The moment was the truth, everything else would be an opinion.

    until next time, truth be told…

  • The masks we wear

    In TDKR, there is an interesting conversation between John Blake and Bruce Wayne, during which the former says that he knows Bruce is the Batman. He then talks of how he does not remember his mother’s death, but remembers his father’s murder well, and that the anger stayed with him. People understand, he says, but they don’t really know. They understand for a while, and they expected him to move on, to let go of the anger.  But he couldn’t do it, and when people realised that, he was sent to therapy and foster homes.

    He realised in time that for people to accept him, he would need to wear a mask that would hide his anger. He reveals that when Bruce visited the boys’ home he lived at years back, he immediately recognised that Bruce was Batman, because he himself wore a mask.

    Thanks to various experiences, I think all of us wear masks. Some of them are not because of experience, but for acceptance among others. Either ways, it works as a coping mechanism, and depending on our skills, at various levels of invisibility to those around us. Sometimes we are conscious of the mask and try to reach a place where we can live without them, by becoming strong enough to either face the past or deal with ‘acceptance’ on our own terms. Yet, despite those efforts, many a time, circumstances are such that the mask becomes the man, consciously or unconsciously. Whether or not that is a good thing is completely context dependent.

    But sometimes we are able to move on, just as Bruce was, embracing aspects of the Batman mask into his own personality. Or maybe it’s the other way – Bruce being a mask that the ‘true’ Batman personality wore. 🙂

    until next time, masker aid