New Equations

1. Another 5 years for sycophants

2. Seeman has the last laugh, though it is of no use to anyone

The eternal nomad

A nice little conversation that happened very late last night made me think again about the idea of an eternal nomad. The eternal nomad may , at first thought, unassumingly pass off as just another theoretical construct born as the result of one of those flights of imagination associated with any “theoretical philosopher’ ( this term will be the subject of  a later post) in the popular imagination. But, I prefer to think otherwise. The eternal nomad, to me,  is a clueless wanderer in the rough terrains of morality which is either popular imagination’s own theoretical construct or one of those evolutionary gifts that mankind delights in messing up completely. He exists by deconstructing and endeavouring to destruct the strands of moral absoultism that shrouds our acts and beliefs, handicapped by the inability to drive home his point in a society where moral hypocrisy itself is barely understood but strictly defined. His moral relativism exits from his willingness to acknowledge that human existence precedes its essence, undaunted by the vagaries of having to stick to endless straws in an effort to lead a life whose essence is void and meaninglessness. He makes efforts to move with the shifting ground beneath him, knowing all along that absolutism exists with different rules, axioms and dogmas at different times not bothering to not change with time. He opposes the idea of this vulgar stasis which depraves human imagination by assuming the role of the unchanging ethic at all times. He understands the motivation for its origins, its futility, its need for destructing human freedom and above all, its propagation as a panacea for all civilisational ills. He rests at times, making his struggle simple to observe, has the most permanent claim to civilisationl identity and starts again. He will keep wandering as long as existence is a mystery and perfection is a distant dream.

Kafkaesque

Gujarat

The death of the poetic man

Nobel lecture of Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote:

  There is a strange and compulsive disorder that pegs me to imagine the possibilities of existence of “the other” in place of “the real” continually. And this crops up in matters ranging from the most mundane and insignificant to the most sacred and occasional. And not so surprisingly, one of my foremost preoccupations when I started writing was in conjecturing what I would do if I were not a writer, the mind verily accepting the possibilities of such a reversal, dropping notions of time and loosing hold of its idea of existence then. That was as romantic as it was solemn, an irony that fuelled another by being the fount of the inexplicable bursts of creativity that characterizes my initial writings. The innumerable visitations of luck that propelled me to do what I did, as you can probably guess now, never found any favor with me. To some this may sound perfectly contradictory, that someone who has looked continually away from what he was, to participate in what he was not only by choosing to be what he was, stands here telling people, whom he got to meet only because of what he is, by writing what he was and is not, the secret behind his detachment from his writing self.

 But there lies the catch and the truth. For, ever since I knew, I was shy of the world and I loved to be so. As Ivan Karamazov says in that mighty Russian novel that explores the mind, it was impossible for me to love anybody when I was near them. This, I took to be normal. But the fun started when I came to be interested in those very things that I felt uncomfortable with. Thus began that transportation – where dissociation was the root of all engagement with the world; a world that sprung up from the imponderable depths of the well into which those around you fell, throwing them up amidst new stories that completely different men played a part in just before.

 But this detachment leads you both to the heights of ecstasy and the depths of despair in equal measure and pace and in there lies the secret I wish to share with you. Not long ago came that huge wave of libertarianism that swept away the most fashionable of men and women; men and women who first fooled themselves by looking at the world from a pedestal that basically made unnecessary ideologies or views, association or dissidence, without knowing it and who later churned their ideologies with more rigor than ever to explain even that contradiction. Like everybody else, they too had their time. They were able to shout over the rooftops as to why men should be free. Alas, for them freedom came in different shapes and different hues. The cup, surprisingly, was big enough to not let anything slip. They used the old and devious way of explaining sanity by spotting insanity. The proudest among them wanted civility without compromise, believed the individual to be the plough ware of all culture and advancement and ownership of property to be the foundation of all human existence. They dreamt of a  heaven on earth where you will have not only the freedom to destroy yourself but also to reserve the right to remain aloof amidst misery and low lives. Compromise is a hated word there – yes, hate wins on a freedom ticket in heaven – and ironically, the freedom to reject this myopic conception of freedom is rejected. Despair plagues you when you are left helpless against sugar-coated history that spoon-feeds content and pride, mistreated history that implores people to believe in simplistic patterns,  preachy rhetoric that views moral victories as zero-sum games and outpours of the angst of existence that consume the substance of other’s lives even while failing to recognize the futility of the next bit. So you would always be in a position to post-morph yourself into that next trendy avatar of yours and the saddest and the most grueling part lies in living with this realization – you wink once and you could be whatever you hated or chose to hate earlier.

 But you are blessed with ecstasy not because you do not fight the battle yourself. Your arm chair may be your biggest comfort and your pen your weapon-clad soothsayer cum pain killer. But still you hold the ability to loose control, to submit authority and while it frightens you to see the opposite alive and kicking, you can draw comfort because the most tender and the least common too survive and the blunt seriousness even makes it necessary to leave some elbow room for the unheard-of-so-far to exist. And such ecstasy is undeserved because one tides along with the mindless frenzy with which time chases itself, time not be mentioned of them, in its bid to outdo itself and ironically lending credibility to the magical-realist circular notion of time by committing the same errors and revisiting the same dark alleys of experience that fit neatly into our landscpae of unimaginative bullet points. And unfortunately, it speaks not just about our failure to learn about our failures to learn from the past but also warns us that the hope to engage will perhaps be the next major casualty as the charm of the lost moments continue to share the dusty rooms of memory with the false promises of a better future made by bitter experiences.

Marx

is the greatest antidote …   

pellet songs

The lunch was heavy and an unusual dose of half sleep that afternoon kept me unperturbed through all that befell us that evening. I was old enough to know that the shot gun could kill at the least something and young enough to not know what they could be. We called the shot pellets ‘ravai’ and for a long time, they were just in our pockets. The trigger was oiled and covered, and without the pullet in, the aim throughout our stroll was clean and wicked .  Perched on the dry tracks the feet of the grazing cattle had left behind, we made our plans. The emphasis was to make even the trials a token success. The first bullets were dislodged with mad cries and as soon as the remaining became countable, the count down began. There had to be a purpose and a target now, for the sacrifice of the bullets that lost their lives lies in the fall of the prey. Loud noises later erupted after the shot was fired, the pellet meeting the streaky wings of the white bird producing not even a faint sound. The signs on the dying bird and the dead bullet rhymed together the last songs of my childhood, lost and long forgotten.

The bird was soon dead and the game continues.

Dear friends,

I overestimated you all. But it was only because you wanted and believed the same.

P.S1: Why do you refuse to believe that you are still feudal at the core your hearts?

P.S2: I know that you don’t care.

p.S3: And i know that i have lost a few years. And i am not as heartless as the last aureliano to call you by your real names. 

Renegades of the past

I saw it on their faces

When the worst was on

They wore it on their sleeves

Like only they can

                                                                    

With x, y and z

Soon the equations beset

On one side you place the guilt

On the other you place the farce

That cries, sobs and weeps

The dirty trick was on

To balance the sides

                    

Like ghouls we preyed on the dead

With blood all over the graveyard bed

Shouts of shattered dreams

And shapeless scattered screams

Seemed to wake us up at last

But we reneged only too fast

                          

Like autumn leaves of the east

The fall attracted only a holiday crowd

The drift happened before our eyes

With no one making raucous cries

                    

That silence spoke so much then

Doesn’t matter today

For we have opened our mouths

And let lies go on a grand parade

      

Why are Indian commies dangerous?

Because,

1. They go crazy first.

2. Then, they start looking for a method to go with their madness.

Sigh!

Intha puliya oru poona kalaaichiruche …