Category: Social Commentary

  • Decision Faker

    Of all the books I’ve recently  read, one I liked immensely was Thrity Umrigar’s “First Darling of the Morning”. Some of it had to do with her wonderful articulation of the pop culture phenomena close to my generation, some of it had to do with her personal traits, which I could identify with (“The more silent and introspective I grew from the inside, the more smart-alecky and verbal I felt compelled to be“), and a lot of it had to do with her honest portrayal of human relationships – their gray areas, their changing nature with time, and many such nuances. Will put up a review here soon.

    One of the things that made me think was this

    And finally, I know that the world still belongs to the adults, and although, in their kindness and mercy they may pretend to share it with us, ultimately it is still their world. It is they who decide when we are old enough to stop playing with dolls, when we should give away toys that they’ve decided we’ve outgrown……”

    I tried to think back to the first decision I had ever gotten to make by myself, but I couldn’t think that far back.  I remembered the days in engineering college – love, politics, future plans, all of which were perhaps my decisions. I also remember getting back from GIM and feeling exactly the way the author describes her last days in college.

    I am nowhere close to being ready to be anything but a college student. The world suddenly feels too big a place for me to navigate.

    And then it dawned on me, that however much I’d like to think that decisions are my own, they perhaps aren’t. There’s always a set of people who play a role in the decisions, directly or indirectly, influencing the outcome. But the decisions are made, for better, or worse. In her acknowledgment, the author uses a phrase “Thank God we don’t get what we deserve in life”.

    When i see ‘kids’ these days, this one for example, or N, and the seeming ease with which they take decisions and handle themselves, I wonder if its a generation thing or a personality thing. Even at this age, there are days when, just before I sleep, I wish I could go back to those times, when by the time I got up, my parents/ grandmother would have fixed the mammoth problem that had seemed so future-threatening to me the night before. These days, I wonder if they ever felt all grown up and in control, or were they just pretending, like I do  many a time now.

    until next time, deservedly so.

  • Crowded Out

    At restaurants, in movie halls, in malls, I sometimes come across people who’re there all by themselves. Not the corporate warrior catching a quick lunch, or the guy catching a movie in a multiplex to kill time, or the husband who got lost while his wife concentrated on the shopping, but the people who look like they wished they had someone to share the moments with.

    I see them furtively glance at the other tables and people, as though trying to steal a vicarious experience. I sometimes wonder how they came to be that way – are they introverts who never managed to get out of their own company, or people who found their partners or soulmates, and lost them midway to life, or did they make a choice of being alone, only to regret it much later in life.

    And then there’s the flip side too. Happened to see Robin Williams’ “World’s Greatest Dad” recently, and was reminded of that. While I agree that ‘lonely’ and ‘alone’ are not the same, I quite liked this line from the movie

    “I used to think the worst thing in life was to end up all alone. It’s not. The worst thing in life is ending up with people who make you feel all alone.”

    In a hyper connected world, with its own sets of cliques and norms and validations and more often than not, a lack of compassion, that is a thought I can relate to. Thankfully, the movie’s soundtrack offers a solution 🙂

    I’ll say who cares
    When people stare
    I will make myself invisible
    Yes I will

    Invisible – Bruce Hornsby

    until next time, virtual immaterialism 🙂

  • Mirror Images

    I came across this passage while reading Kiran Desai’s “The Inheritance of Loss”. The context is of a young girl, who, because of a new found romance suddenly becomes conscious of herself.

    “But how did she appear? She searched in the stainless-steel pots, in the polished gompa butter lamps, in the merchants’ vessels in the bazaar, in the images proffered by the spoons and knives on the dining table, in the green surface of the pond. Round and fat she was in the spoons, long and thin in the knives, pocked by insects and tiddlers in the pond; golden in one light, ashen in another; back then to the mirror; but the mirror, fickle as ever, showed one thing, then another and left her, as usual, without an answer.”

    I found that I could also identify with it in the context of our encounters with the social platforms around – Orkut, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn.. and how slowly the ‘Like’ and RTs seem to be defining the interactions and affecting even perceptions and understanding of the self. Its not as though people and comments never existed before, but the sheer mass of people we come into contact with, thanks to the social platforms is unprecedented. Through the conversations and responses, we see a bit of ourselves, a self colored by the other person’s perceptions. As the voices around us continue to increase, at some point, is there a danger of losing touch with what we really are? Yes, you could ignore or be selective, but then we’d just get back to an objectivity argument.

    “The biggest danger, that of losing oneself, can pass off as quietly as if it were nothing; every other loss, an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc. is bound to be noticed.”

    I read that, thanks to @aanteadda‘s share on Twitter – an excellent take on the Ramayana,(do read it) and in a completely different context – that of dharma, it happened to arrive around the same place. Rama, having lived his entire life by what he considered his dharma, is distressed by what he must do with Sita after the end of the war with Ravana, irrespective of what he personally wants. The author thinks that this is Rama’s tragedy, and that of every person who lives by ‘impartial and abstract principles’, which don’t take into account ‘individuals as persons,’ and can’t see the difference between a situation and a personal situation’, and it can only lead to the destruction of the self.

    And so I wondered, whether its people, or a moral code that one follows, whatever dictates what we do, is there really a difference – between the reflections from others and ourselves? Is there one right answer for what should define us and the way we live. I think not.

    We must prioritise, I guess, based on what we think will give us happiness, and just like this neat article on addiction (the internet in particular) ends, “we will increasingly be defined by what we say no to”, all thanks to an abundance of choices, from within and without.

    until next time, you always have a choice, but do you always want a choice?

  • Watermark

    Sometime back, while trying recollect the name of a Chinese restaurant in Koramangala which existed circa 2003, I got stuck. Despite different mashups of the various terms used typically for Chinese restaurant names, nothing sounded right. It was a small mom-and-pop joint and since the net didn’t then feature all the resources it has now, I was well and truly stumped. It was quite disappointing since we’d had many a meal there. It didn’t help that I have this ‘thing’ about remembering such places, events and people. I feel as though I have betrayed them in some way. Yes, weird, thank you. :p  The book, for once, couldn’t help either. I finally got the answer by checking with a friend who’d been in Koramangala long enough. Once I got the name, I even managed to get an image on the net – Szechuan Garden. 🙂

    A few days later, I watched Pakal Nakshatrangal, a movie about a script writer – director played by Mohanlal. The narrative is from the perspective of his son, an author, who writes his father’s biography, and in the process tries to solve the mystery of his death. The movie begins with the demolition of ‘Daffodils’, the cultural hub of the previous era’s intellectuals and the scene of Mohanlal’s many exploits. There is a sequence in which a television newsreader reports this and we can see different people viewing it from different places reminiscing about their experiences there. A group of people connected by a place.

    A place or an event in that place – that means something to a set of people – something only they share. And when they cease to exist, the memory disappears. Its as though whatever they shared never existed. A bit like the Garden State quote that I often end up using “Maybe that’s all family really is. A group of people who miss the same imaginary place.”

    It reminded me of another Malayalam movie I’d seen a while back. Kerala Cafe, an anthology of ten short movies, with the place – Kerala Cafe, a coffee shop in a railway station, serving as the connection. But more than that entire movie, I remembered my favourite – Island Express, written and directed by Shankar Ramakrishnan. (Part 1, 2, seems unedited, and has incomplete subtitle help!!) [Spoiler] The story is about several people who were in some way affected by the Perumon tragedy in 1988, and their meeting at the fateful place a couple of decades later. Its narrated by Leon, who  lost a lot himself, but makes a photo-book of it after seven years of efforts. I realise that Leon’s phrase, that remained with me long after the movie, is what this thought is all about.

    As time passes, and life moves on, some of us are left holding the memories of these places, sometimes by choice, sometimes because we have no other choice, and sometimes by chance. But there’s no doubt about the transience of it all. Its after all, a matter of time. Perhaps the entire idea of a lifestream – the things I share here, and everywhere else is all about the phrase that Leon uses – ‘a memory with a watermark’.

    until next time, memories without shelf-lives

  • Only time will tell…

    My reading list during the Sikkim trip consisted of “The Immortals of Meluha” and “Chasing the Monk’s shadow”, fiction and non fiction respectively. Sometime during the trip, I completed the former, the latter was completed long after the trip.

    The first book is a work of fiction that treats Shiva, the Hindu god, as a real person and tries to look at mythology through a historical perspective. The second is a journal of a person who retraces (almost) the epic journey of Xuanzang (the latest spelling of the person we learned about as Hiuen Tsang in school). One myth, one history. One is a possibility, the other ‘factual’.

    The first, about a Tibetan tribal chieftain who is looked upon by a civilisation as the messiah promised in their legends. The second, a monk with an insatiable thirst for India.  In this age of rapid advances in communication, it was quite an experience to be transported to a time when people got news years or even decades after it happened. A monk who starts a journey based on a certain information, only to realise that while he was traveling towards his destination, things had changed – kings deposed, lifestyles changed, faith forgotten….

    The passage of time gives us a bird’s eye view of what happened then, allowing us to dwell on the possibilities of how/if Gods were created, to interpret snippets of information gleaned from remnants of a life, what it must’ve been like. From our vantage point, we see patterns, lifelines almost crossing each other, tantalisingly close, with the possibility of drastically changing the flow of events that transpired later. All this, after patiently sifting through the layers that have been added over the years.

    I wonder if, thanks to the way we consume and share information, later archaeologists will have a reverse problem, of having to go through mounds of information- multiple perspectives to separate facts from opinions. Or maybe, it has always been like that, and the sands of time have a way of burying it randomly. It is quite humbling to think of the possibility of Iceland’s volcano being a footnote in history, because it so happened that what survived was a casual, unaffected post which treated it as a minor news, as opposed to the anguished post of someone whose plans went awry, all thanks to it.

    Another reminder that history and beyond is just a perspective we get from what survived.

    until next time, time consumes too 🙂