Category: Society & Culture

  • 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 🙂

  • All I have to do is dream…

    Yes. Quite liked the movie – Inception. Mostly because I found the concept  (dream incubation, lucid dreaming) interesting and because it forced me to pay attention. Sometimes, movies like that can be refreshing. Of course, it helped that the visuals were very watchable too, and the last shot added to the charm.

    For those who haven’t seen the movie, not to worry, the post only refers to it in terms of concept. At a very basic level, its about planting an idea (Inception) inside a person’s head. Only, he shouldn’t know it was planted by someone else, he should think it’s his idea.  In a world where a lot of people anyway falsely claim an idea as their own, you might wonder why this is interesting, but  ignore that for now. 🙂 Meanwhile, since the person needs to think its his idea, a basic version of the idea is planted in a dream state, in the subconscious.

    Like the movie maker has said about the end, its whatever you want it to be, so here goes. The other reason I liked the movie was because of the ‘life subtext” – the part that makes comparisons to The Matrix inevitable. I thought many acts of ‘Inception’ happen to us too, over a period of time – sometimes done by others, sometimes by ourselves – conditioning. And since we don’t really contemplate why we choose to do a certain thing/in a certain way, we end up thinking that what we’re doing is what we really want.

    Half my life
    Is in books’ written pages
    Lived and learned from fools and
    From sages
    You know it’s true
    All the things come back to you

    And just like how in the movie, the ‘projections’ (things and people used by a dream-architect to populate the dream world) turn hostile when the person detects an external presence in their sub conscious, in life, the problem starts when we suddenly realise the existence of the conditioning, and realise that perhaps, much time has been spent on chasing an ‘inception’.

    Every time that I look in the mirror
    All these lines on my face getting clearer
    The past is gone
    It went by, like dusk to dawn

    And yet, some would say that their lives have been made better by pursuing that one idea. So how do we really know? In the movie, the people who carry out ‘inception’ and the lower forms of the art (extraction) have a totem that helps them distinguish dreams from reality. I wonder if we have something comparable, but then, I wonder, if life would be as interesting as it is if I did have a spinning top or a rolling dice to give me a better grip on reality. 🙂

    until next time, deception 🙂

    Lyrics: Dream On, Aerosmith.

  • 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?

  • Recycling Gods

    Sometime back, I’d written a post about super powered individuals who later came to be known as Gods, and how technology is perhaps taking us closer and closer to these versions of gods. And sometime back, Vimoh too wrote a very thought provoking post on the evolution of Hindu gods, and how, over a period of time, important Vedic gods like Indra, Varuna, Agni etc have lost their importance to a newer set who rose to prominence according to the stage of our civilisation – Ganesha, Saraswati, whose ‘hidden’ characteristics were brought to light. An evolution from gods “that govern the elements of nature to gods that govern abstract concepts of the mind”. He also hypothesises that  in the future, the list will be further transformed when man realises that the universe is more of a network than a hierarchy and when he finds himself at par with the highest of gods and the lowest of forms, he will realise his divinity.

    I’ve always wondered whether the original set of gods was a small number and as needs arose, historical characters were pushed into divinity, their stories exaggerated, and for later generations they served as gods. The original triumvirate – Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva have remained more or less a constant in their importance, though Brahma lost out in terms of places of worship.  But the evolution of gods is something I completely agree with.  As our needs changed and the things we could control changed, it was perhaps inevitable that the things we attributed to them would change. More importantly, they also changed with out interpretations of good and evil. Since our gods have always been close to us, their character and behaviour also reflected this change in ethos.  Huffington Post says they’re now pop culture, through Bollywood movies, for example. But yes, they were always more human, and ‘approachable’ anyway.

    It does bring up a point though. I wonder how our current depiction of Hindu Gods would affect how later generations perceive them. The modern retelling, which sometimes adds layers hitherto absent. Imagine a future generation treating Ramanand Sagar’s Ramayana the way we treat the vedas now simply because earlier sources may not stand the test of time. If they saw Sippy’s Mahabharat and also saw Jha’s Rajneeti, would they be able to grasp the parallel? Or would they miss it because they haven’t ‘lived’ with the gods like we have? ‘Sita’ in the television series was ‘Deepika’, the actress, who has also played other roles in serials and movies. So, without a context, it might be just another role she did. There is a reason I’m thinking this way. Any of the gods could be just a role play – incarnations/manifestations – different roles in different contexts at different times. We rely on certain images and certain texts which are possibly incomplete in their current form. And thus rises the question that invariably gets asked in such discussions – who created who?

    Each age fills up the void of its unknown with its own versions of God or his opposite number. Like Vimoh states at the end of his post, the future explorer will be an amalgamation – with knowledge from many disciplines. For now, we pursue the mystery from among the tools we choose based on our interest, bias, and faith – science, religion, philosophy, and so on. The question is, will we ever reach a point when everything is known, and the God shaped hole would be finally filled with our knowledge. Maybe that’s the point when the current Brahma gets irritated and presses the ‘Delete All’ button, and the Brahman starts with the next Brahma. 🙂

    until next time, divine grapevines 🙂