Wish away a scorpion's sting

Sometimes you go through days to see yourself through somebody else's eyes. Say a sentence rehearsed in your head and then watch the air deflate from its imagined lift in your head. Your eyes are narrowed, your smile genial, your mind congealed from the earnestness of your imagined acrobatics-- what you do not want to confront is that your earnestness is a function of practiced repetition in the hope that you can regurgitate art from all that you consume. Sometimes you blow your nose and take a deep breath to fill your insides with air--- and in that intake, you hope to have hope splayed out in your insides, from the tips of your fingers to the bristles under your nose. You want to feel the pit of your stomach rise and fall with the inlaid rhythm of hope.  Your mind reins you in. Be cautious. Hope can fall through the cracks.

I am most grateful for being able to witness the inner workings of intimate solitude, the kind that cut close to your bones and draws the outside inwards, a reversed cyclotron if you will. Before the pandemic, I didn't know what this all meant-- living through and with solitude in an intimate two-person space. The space isn't cramped but the ruse extends beyond the metaphor. There is the pressure of doing things, ensuring things are business as usual, putting up a front, and then there is the other being inside, who wishes away things in the quest to access an imaginary being-- the kind who can be the epitome of perfection in the middle of a devastating ordeal. 

Today I learned you can wish away a scorpion's sting by pasting a poisonous admixture on your skin and then watch the upper layer curdle. There, right there, is your immunity in motion!

JoJo Rabbit Reminded Me of What Films Can Do

 There are these rare moments when the filmic world melds into the real so seamlessly that the material frame of the screen holding the constructed universe becomes an extension of both our lived and imagined experiences. And even rarer is the moment when the material frame cannot contain the quaking existential graveyard inside our collective hearts and minds. Ten minutes into the filmic universe of Jojo Rabbit, similar to Moonrise Kingdom sans the uncontrollable symmetric precision of generic Wes Andersonian stylized aesthetics, you know you are in the presence of something special. It helps that the holocaust has been hitherto palimpsestically rendered; the precedent is there, and the director is activating collective memory. The stage is already set, no further paraphernalia is necessary for the exposition — we dive into a textured sepia-toned world that seems monstrously like our contemporary moment: children are blinded by hate beyond repair; they slingshot grenades like flying discs; blow up rafters in exchange of greetings; participate in desultory adult-like conversations with a worldliness that is comedic but played to frightening effect.

I have always wondered about the profilmic moment in front of the camera and the chosen angular posing that determines the audience’s point of view. What if the protagonist was someone else — the mother who executes (and is in turn executed) the impossible task of conveying what it means to be radically hospitable through time and timelessness — would the filmic universe still have that same hold? I use timelessness as a metaphor here, but the implication is real — celebrated philosophers will tell you that radical hospitality is timeless because it is impossible — impossible to perform, impossible to demonstrate, impossible to hold. But Taika Waititi comes really close to making it possible, which brings me to the question — what can films do?

I watched Jojo Rabbit in a theatre in Kolkata with eight other people, six of whom were at least ten feet away (way before social distancing became a ritual), situated like islands in different corners of the sprawling room. Nervous laughter from an unidentified corner of the theatre sometimes punctuated the sequences while silent tears rolled down my cheeks. Part of the theatre watching experience is to second guess other people’s emotions; you sometimes hear other people react to cues and you are startled by other artistic interpretations of the same event. The sonic, the visual and the performative had synchronously mutated for me into an unexplainable affect that found some articulation through oblique physical gestures — my being conscious of myself crying in a room filled with mostly strangers and my being conscious of the delicate fragility of that constructed space; the movie on the big screen, the material contours of a room, the intellectual proximity of a close friend and the nervous laughter from unnamed bodies. During intermission, I pointedly refused to meet the eyes of my friend next to me, also an artist, lest he witnesses the despair within.

But amidst all that quaking desolation, onscreen and off — I watched humanity unfold as a 10-year-old Nazi befriends a fourteen-year-old Jew. Just like everyone else, I root for the mother, her fierce strength and buoyancy as she traipses down the verdant countryside slopes in her summer hats. But, the profilmic narrative had already been parsed and carefully curated by a master conjurer who knows how to play his cards right. Like everyone else, I willed the mother to survive but my theory-addled brain already knew that radical hosts were impossible both in theory and art. The sequence when it comes pulses with hooded eyes staring out of droopy windows; a lidded hat pulled over the ears, drowning the sonic but transmuting the filmic into the specular — the hooded eyes fixate on us as we collectively shift in our seats. Contact is established but we see what Jojo sees — a shattered dream and an unforeseen settlement.

When the movie ends, and some amount of hope has been vindicated — everyone knows this part of the story by now — the quaking graveyard inside me is filled up by the corpses of many dead weights. Hope is entombed in despair.

As someone who sometimes attempts to write for an imaginary audience but mostly to assuage a deep sense of guilt for not always being viscerally cognizant of the value of what I do, there are these moments when I force myself to go back to the fundamentals. What is the value of Art at the end of the world? It is perhaps not a question of efficacy, after all, but one strictly lodged in the aesthetics. But can there be an objective value ever placed on aesthetics?

We have all seen those lists — books to read during quarantine, films to watch, recipes to perfect, list to end all lists and so continues the endless rigamarole of regurgitated curated hyperlinks. But what if the pandemic crisis is not as they say the exemplary condition of the present moment but something far deep-rooted and at the risk of sounding terribly pessimistic — the only condition that binds us together. What can be the value of the visual when the pre-existing profilm is a shared condition of loss, degradation and disaster; at all times inflected by variations of the personal and the collective experience. The question then perhaps is one of scale or rather a movement — how much a work of art can move you; or drive one to explore the banality of our existence, stripped away from all accouterments.

Like the novelist and the artist, both the seasoned and the amateur, the filmmaker for me is neither a historian nor a prophet, and neither they should be hailed as one or held against metrics to adjudge whether they qualify as one. There was a time when art thrived in collective anonymity and did not buckle from preset neoliberal aspirations of what it meant to be considered great or who makes it to what list. One knew of them through their greatness and not because they were dispatched by already adjudged greats. The filmmaker like the novelist is an explorer of existence and a host that must believe in the possibility of radical hospitality. The viewer is above all a guest that is choosing to participate in an exchange where they are opening themselves up to be moved. The medium, the film, and the storytelling must be able to create an unobstructed opening for that engagement. So this larger discussion is really about how much films can move you.

And above all is the question of aesthetics and playful inventiveness — the comedy at the heart of the tragedy and the exceptional at the heart of the banality. The present ongoing catastrophe can very well attest to the curious aporia of our time — people dying all around is catastrophic, while celebrities not having the correct flavour of ice cream in the house and migrant labourers dying of hunger show up on our newsfeed as personal and collective disasters. Taika Waititi’s hammy Hitler and exploration of radical hospitality reminds us of the optimism of extreme artistic will and the pessimism of cynicism.

I wanted to believe that day like Jojo, that I too will find my soul, but the world around me looked bleaker than ever as I made my way outside from the dimly lit theatre, scrolling through the news that notified me of more human rot. A student protester in Delhi was repeatedly shot in the hand by a gunman with links to a radical Hindu nationalist organization on the day of Gandhi’s assassination. I read the news and steeled myself for scheduled meetings with old friends, knowing that this moment too shall pass like most other things. But in the silence of my room, well past midnight, in the darkness of a semi moonlit night, I remembered the vulnerability of a ten-year-old boy who has butterflies in his stomach and a dance in his steps.

Amrita De

Writings on film and gender politics

writing as habit/ there will be typos

 Anything remotely resembling habit quickly becomes the habitat for worst impulses like a creeper canoodling a concrete wall (so much for icky imagery.  This is more inspired than I am letting on. There is a creeper gnawing through the living room wall, fangs blaring when observant but remarkably pliant and docile from a distance-- part of the grad school aesthete you know. Hah, creeper in living room ). 

Anyway, long story short, THIS IS IT. This will be the hub to visualize all the mess, knots in my head, literally the place where I wrestle with conflicting thoughts and make a free wheeling attempt to run a wooden comb through all the unwieldy tresses. There won't be much beauty to this madness, but indeed, there would be some sort of method. After all, isn't this the place to organize the mess.  So here I shall be thinking through some of my present obsessions. 

politics : always the politics but this time with the poetics

pedagogy: what is even radical inclusivity sans Derridean hospitality? There I said it.

attachments : shout out to Berlant, Ahmed and Hartman

literary : again, what gives when we consider the literary without the political or as a function of the political or at loggerheads with the political. That said, I am a Glissant loyalist. In fact, I should name this blog rhizomes.

Identity politics : And against Paranoid reading.  this is a special category. enough said.

love : against erotophobia

desire : pretty much desire for everything...desire for reattaching our alignment with the real. what is the real anyway?

writing : writing as an act of radical hospitality. And writers who inspire and provoke. 

I am not sure much good will come from this obsessive need to calibrate every thought nugget, to pulse it into digestible granules ala Adornean babyfood, but this is a very crude attempt to inject life into tired reasonings. To re-verve and reaffirm our attachment to the political by reminding myself that tired desensitization to constant impulses will not get you, me , or anyone else anywhere. If at all, it will definitely accelerate the gutting process. 

Anyway, in other news. I am teaching hopefully my last in-person course in a while, starting tomorrow. There is so much anxiety and unreconciled desire that I am not, yet, comfortable letting on here. After all, I am aware this is public flailing and even then, one must put up a show. But let this be a space to dial down knee jerk reactionary responses and participate in the hard work of thinking through this mess, with patience and care. Again, aware of how political care economy is, but hey, this is me pulling the strings in this space! I am militantly committed to preserving the sanctity of my hard limits. 

Also trying to finish the dissertation this semester. Long day's journey into night.

Feels good to be back here. Last time I checked, I was really whining about unrequited love. haha. Some pleasure in the foolishness after all. 

 There will be typos. 

late night mutterings.

This year has been an important year.

 Nothing can quite match up to the continued extravagance that has been this year.

And now at this unearthly hour, dulled by the searing cold, I feel strangely situated and adrift at the same time. There is staid contentment, laced with a tinge of melancholia- of roads not taken and words not uttered -of bridges not burnt and quests, hurriedly abandoned midway.

But above all, there is hope that next year will be as extravagant as this one.

All the jazz.

 I have spent the past two hours digging up my old posts and reading other old, forgotten and now defunct blogs of friends, acquaintances - the works.  I have obviously been cracking up at the sheer immaturity and the startling level of transparency displayed in most of these writings.

 In a time, when  words are weighed out in terms of rhetoric and carefully constructed sentences that reek of a certain cultured eloquence-- these writings stand testimony to the fact that there was a time when we were brave enough or probably young enough to lay bare our souls without worrying about being judged. We were not so much taken in by a turn of a phrase as much as by the turn of events which deserved a worthy mention on blogsphere.

Most importantly, it made me reflect on the girl I once was and the being I have morphed into today. Interestingly, each one of those events which lie concealed in this blog under a haze of flimsy embellishments have been so instrumental in helping me morph into this being that I do not so easily recognize now.

As I lay cringing in my bed for the better part of the two hours, eyes glazed from the fixity of gaze that held the laptop screen in rapt attention, old memories were rekindled- churning out easily recognizable patterns that my life can be broken into; the same fears, the same insecurities staring back at me like old friends reunited after years, embracing- silhouetted against the backdrop of a setting sun and rapidly falling dusk while I zoom in and out of the frame- never too far, never too close but always lingering- ALWAYS lingering- just within reach.

For all the smugness that I can grant myself for having accumulated some amount of sparing wisdom, there is a deep hollow inside - for things that can never really be ever filled up to the brim. There is always a price. For every reckless joy and every wanton sorrow, there is some compensation- some creases that need to be ironed out, some bloody price that has to be paid. For who can be so blessed to drink deep from the chalice of both sorrow and happiness without having sacrificed something in the process?

There is no love without pain and only the love that has exulted in the deepest throes of pain can be worthy enough to be recorded for posterity's sake. No other love is great enough or noble enough to warrant such singular distinction.

And blessed are those who have seen it all.

Blessed are those who have quavered from the sheer intensity of it all and have experienced the state of being broken into a million pieces.

And amidst all this mindless cacophany, you find a part of yourself being born anew- soaring in the endless sky- rising like a phoenix from the ashes and in that single moment when you are poised to fly, you are infinite- a million worlds nested within but so delicately congealed into that singular mass.  This is when you find all the reasons that is reason enough to worth risking such a love that is so delicately fragile but grotesque in its intensity.

A part of me does not believe in anything that I have typed out here. The part of me which is too cynical and too weathered to negotiate the possibility of such occurences. All of this looks good in movies, old Bollywood movies-soulful and melancholy like a Geeta Dutt number. But there is a certain specificity to this kind of melancholia. It hovers around you, enveloping you but never quite touching you.

And then there is another part of me which believes that one day I will get back all my reasons to risk everything for a cause that might tremble against the limits of sanity, but in all that trembling insanity- I will be complete and infinite. And it shall always be worth the effort. Always.

I can't help but crack up inside as to how easy it gets, when you try churning out long drawn , meandering sentences with a generous smattering of misplaced punctuation, in the quiet silence of darkness- all in an effort to sound grown up and mature- when in reality you can never live up to all this jazz. :D 

Lost in translation

Fumbling with letters, feelings and the multiple voices in your head- a curious patch work of words clumsily sewn together which transform into one of those fancy quilts that adorn your bed. So much and I mean so much is always lost in translation.

Beautiful, poignant words; of the poetic kind can lift your spirits like a jesting wind raise those fallen leaves in autumn- just an inch before the wind dies down. But there is a mad rush: a flurry of excitement which precedes this inevitable death that can be read in the collective swish of leaves being picked up and dropped. This is what beautiful words do to you. There is a soaring feeling inside which dies an eventual death.

But in that brief instant of soaring, you experience a million worlds erupt within you, of watching fireworks burst into the night sky and of feeling more alive and more real than what you have ever experienced before. 

long after the music is heard no more.

Sometimes it takes a special kind of hearing to hear most of the words that are left unsaid, even when the obvious reality prods you into hearing otherwise- there is always some music playing in the background. You need to strain your ears to hear it but when you can do that, you will feel the music engulfing you in its soft, feathery grip as you viscerally feel your heart soaring and plummeting to the rhythm.

And long after the final cadences are played out, you can still hear the music around you as it trails farther off, leaving a wispy haze behind.

Note to self.

I am 23 years now- that is technically 5 yrs since I soared and plummeted into the world of adulthood, both in equal measure ; the soaring and plummeting that is.

I don't feel like an adult. I try to behave like one. I really really try. But I am not sure how much that works.

But then I have these disturbing moments of epiphany and I can actually feel myself growing up, you know in your head you are 5ft and a decent 4 inches, make that 3 ( i am trying not to be too ambitious here ). You are strutting about in high heels, hair swishing back and forth. There is a collective intake of breath as you enter the conference room and all eyes are upon you as you flash that winning smile, which smiles back at you from the gleaming backside of the recent book that you have authored.  There are cameras flashing at your direction and every word that you speak is held in rapt attention. You look quite the picture-you with your winning smile in all that sartorial elegance, deftly answering questions with a cultured restraint that can only be acquired over years of practice. You smile a poised and well practiced smile.

 For all that is worth, it is important to get the whole act right. Doing anything otherwise would be just killing it- like dislodging a strategically positioned rock and bringing about a landslide. Who cares if you have never known love or feel terribly hollow and empty inside- it is still important to pull yourself together and get the whole Act right. Therein my friend, lies the emblem of true showmanship- when you can pull yourself together even at that precise moment, when you are sinking deeper into the abyss but you still retain the poise and dignity. You smile even when you are breaking inside. That is my friend,true showmanship !

My hitherto 23 yrs of existence has been spent in a flimsy pursuit of trying to get this whole act together. Not all of it has been futile but yet again today, in the slowly gathering darkness, I realize how much of it has been in vain. Here I am, quite a standard mess in the most standard way that you would define a "mess", struggling with dreams and aspirations, more imposing than my diminutive frame. I, who have always been vertically challenged can only dream of soaring-flying beyond the hitherto untrammeled seas and oceans, past huge expanses of valleys, over the raging rapids, riding the waves- never slipping, never retreating, always guiding myself forward.  I cannot resign myself to walking or simply running, for fly I must and fly I will.

 But all this drama can happen only in your head and in the face of real adversity, you stumble only to cower behind a protective force; willing yourself to believe that this protective force will fight your battles and help you in putting the said act together.  Of course, you do not have the wisdom to understand how this action could permanently impair your agency-clipping your wings while hanging like a millstone round your neck. And that is how you kill your own dreams, a little every minute- beating the life out of them, till they lie dissolved in one squirming heap that is forever rendered immobile. Dreams are mobile creatures.They bring momentum and agency in your life.

You kill something fundamental within your own self, every moment you judge your own dreams and seek refuge behind another person. Every time you dissociate your dreams from yourself and try to transmute your ideas and beliefs with someone else's beliefs and ideals, you are guilty of adulterating  something that was intrinsically yours in the purest form possible. You are guilty of becoming the lyrics in someone else's song and the paint in someone else's painting. That is one of the very worst things you could do to yourself- killing your own dreams by viewing your life as an extension of someone else's life.

Most of this is written as a reminder to my 23 yr old Self.

Disgrace

 I rarely discuss books here.

 There is a reason for this. Books are an ubiquitous presence in my life. Talking about them with a convincing degree of reverence intact does seem stretched at this point. It is not like I am proclaiming myself to be widely read or trying to brag about my erudition here. It is just that, at this point I rarely come across a book that sustains my interest till the end.  After a couple of pages, I will inevitably find the narrative slipping into a predictable mould and that would be the end of it.

But Disgrace by Coetzee has achieved some sort of a rare,singular distinction, given my erratic disposition and infinitesimally small attention span. It is one of those rare books that I have read twice - at one sitting without discarding it unceremoniously.

I remember the first time I read this book, I was in eleventh standard. It was a different time then- something that seems almost surreal in retrospect. There is this particular thing that going back in memory does to you. Even the most unpleasant of memories take on some sort of a delicate sheen, when viewed from the distance of a few years. This always comes with the risk of appearing too impersonal,with an underlying sense of subtle smugness. This comes from knowing that you have been through shit and conquered it with some amount of grace, that indeed looks laudable in retrospect.

There was me- all of sixteen years, a bespectacled nerdy teenager, fielding obstacles that looked insurmountable at that time but seems dismissively juvenile now. I was also battling serious academic issues which got worse by the time I was in twelfth standard.

The annual examinations were just about to commence. I had already failed in Maths and Physics in the internals. For all my inconsistencies , I managed to behave out of character by manifesting a startling level of consistency in the reckless way I failed most of the science subjects then. I had, by then steeled myself and learnt to look at such events as temporary outcomes that are necessary for sustainable growth in the future.
I was a rather refined optimist who was blessed with this exceptional quality to silently goad oneself on, even when things looked disastrously bleak. I never lost my cool, which did not go down well with the Mater who was literally tearing her hairs out, at my unwillingness to react more aptly to the dire situation I was in.

So on that day, I had shut myself up in my room while my mother raged on outside- a veritable tornado that did not show any signs of ceasing.  This was the only book lying on the bed. My mother had taken care to remove all the non-academic books from my room. This one remained as a glaring reminder of how inefficient she had been in her task, I could not help but think at that point.

The next three hours passed in a haze. I drifted in an out of the narrative. Everything descended into an ominous silence once I was done. This book rendered any banal response to the world around me so despairingly obscene. I could not just sit still and not be shattered in the very depths of my being about what I had just read. Everything seemed so strange and unreal. The fact that I had failed in my internals did not seem as devastating to me as this book did. I was sixteen- not so well schooled about the ways of the world then. It understandably affected me in a far more visceral way than what it did today when I was reading it for the second time.

In the six and half years that have transpired in between, I have thought of this book many many times-on occasions when I have read some other book by Coetzee or come across some incident, that has really shaken me up in an uncomfortable way. i have however never discussed this book with anyone before. I just never felt comfortable about it. This book was so personally felt that it almost seemed like a transgression, to  discuss it with any kind of added embellishment that comes in the name of literary criticism. I could never adopt the required neutral gaze that becomes necessary, when you have to come up with a nuanced critical argument. I could not measure out in sentences what this book exactly did for me.  Herein lies the beauty of Coetezee's deliberations and the dexterity with which he wields every word. The glaring economy in the usage of words that promotes any sort of emotional excess, does precisely what it consciously tries to avoid- one is left grappling with emotions that are beyond one's control.

I do not think I have ever read a book as nightmarishly absorbing as this one. The grating diction opens up to you- speaks to you in a way, the only living can. Most other books gives in to the lure of conscious posturing by the author, who is always conscious of the fact that he is being assessed with every sentence that he pens down. Not this one. There is a certain degree of nakedness in the way the subject has been treated, which makes me want to fall in love with Coetzee over and over, again and again. I have never come across a more honest writer.

All of this, so that you go and read this book NOW, if you haven't already.

Shady delights.

It is really hot in here. The kind of heat that secures you in a vice-like grip leaving you feeling pretty much worthless all the time. This is also the time when people start behaving mostly out of character.

That day I spotted S in a veritable rage, stomping on the ground, hurling the choicest abuses and what not. I was momentarily confused and then she grabs hold of me, launching into a litany of complaints, refusing to let go of my hand all the while. I try to placate her by saying things- half of which I didn't obviously mean, managing to calm her down in what seems like an eternity.  I then hug her tight, transferring some of the clammy, slimy heat onto her rather becoming petite frame which results in her dissolving into tears. Now, S is hardly the kind of person who is erm what to say..so superfluous with her emotions. She is either mostly cool and composed or blurting out the most outrageous statements that would make us all collapse in helpless laughter. On one such occasion, she had mentioned " I can tolerate villains but not dumb people ". A minute late, we were all (including her) clutching our sides, giving in to fresh spasms of laughter. She is adorable that way and most of the time she makes real aww-inducing comments which make everyone dissolve in a puddle- even the hardest of hearts. There is factual proof to certify this which I am not going to disclose here obviously. However, this heat can bring out the worst in even the most 'awww-worthy' person. There was S bawling like an errant child, complaining about uncharacteristic gusto about pretty much everything- from the insurmountable heat to the covert danger of being too nice to people who take you for granted and the sudden overwhelming rise in the number of hypocrites over the years. She is an observant girl by nature who loves to take credit for noticing things that you and I would probably pass by without so much as a nod. But S is not to be taken lightly. If she complains about the sudden, overwhelming rise in the number of hypocrites over the years, I suspect she has her reasons and should not be brushed away lightly.


I am nearing the end of my 5 yr long affair with JUDE now. This relationship is clearly very much over and now we are just stretching it. Nothing is more painful than a relationship that has run its course and you are still somewhere answerable to it. However even the most devastating of relationships have room for small mercies.  So there it was that day- my small mercy which made me consider- maybe my relationship with JU still has something left to it.

So I was walking down the long rambling road that threads past the much undignified Central library and snakes deeper into this lake-side of sorts. This part of the campus is offset by an eminently inedible canteen on one side and rows of trees standing up like sentinels on the other. Now this part of JU is specially demarcated for lovers. After sunset, hidden by the gathering darkness, on your way to the women's hostel one always runs the risk of running into couples in compromising positions; of entwined bodies erupting into soft shrieks and gasps of teasing laughter and groups of people drinking behind the clump of trees or probably rolling hash joints with a speed and dexterity that never ceased to surprise me.
 It was nowhere close to sunset that day which was a relief.

So I was on my way to the godforsaken place that is KMR or the administrative building which single-handedly can cause nightmares in every JU student. You are not a JU student if you haven't ever experienced the trauma that is KMR. KMR is an institution in itself. It does not seem right to talk about KMR in a divisive way, The KMR experience is something that I would never even wish on my worst enemy and I am not exactly what you might say, a benevolent soul. now figure.  The name itself "KAY- EM- AR" has a forbidden ring to it.

So on my way to the "KAY-EM-AR", I was naturally seized by thoughts that made the bile rise in my stomach. I could also sense the fear that was clenching the insides of my rather weak heart as I incessantly kept on talking to myself, making a valiant attempt to assure myself that things will be alright and they cannot possibly screw me in the last semester. I was nearing the Mechanical building when I saw one of the street urchins that regularly haunt the university campus, scrounging about for scraps of food. My heart went out to the little kid. Now I do not believe in giving money to them as 5 yrs in JU has knocked some sense in me that the money given to them serves a more sinister purpose than buying them an afternoon meal.

So I retraced my steps, went back to the canteen and got the little girl a thali which had rice, fish and some 2-3 curries to go with it. I gave her the thali, smiled at her, and went on my way. I did not want to wait there to see her eating it.  However, she started to walk beside me, clutching her thali, and started jabbering about the heat and how she slept beside the lake, the night before.  IT suddenly occurred to me that she in her barely there clothes was freer than what I could ever possibly be with my university education and all. By then, her spirits had soared which was quite infectious and I found myself worrying less about the KMR debacle.

She spotted a dog that was lying a bit ahead from the Mechanical building looking all woebegone and emaciated in the heat. Both their eyes lit up as they saw each other and I saw the most beautiful drama unfold before my eyes. She hopped towards the dog, kissed his forehead while the dog happily started circling her feet. She then laid down the thali before the dog. Both of them were soon eating out of the same plate.  I watched them both from a distance. I did not want to disturb them.

This stayed with me long after I had got back home that day and I suddenly did not feel like complaining about JU or the heat anymore.

The answer my friend is blowin' in the wind

There is a certain amount of madness in the air today- that kind of madness you would associate with a mad girl's love song. What is it about the mad girl that renders her version of love, a convincing degree of singularity?  Is it because she is not exactly capable of loving in the conventional manner, you know the conventional manner, where the woman expresses her love and in most cases is loved back in return? The usual drill follows, laughter at the silliest joke possible, tears at the slightest reproach. and then the never-ending fights and days of silence. There is a sudden intake of breathe and a even more sudden burst of clarity, the illuminating kind and the resourceful individual that you are, you are already striding towards the exit with a vengeance that would put even the most committed cynic to shame. Of course, there is a certain amount of melodrama involved in this elaborate charade of love. It is supposed to be that way after all. What is all this brouhaha about love if it is not dramatized enough? what is the purpose of a love story, if one does not shed copious amount of tears, ranting at length about the absolute inefficacy of a love story?

And then there is the ,mad girl's love song- when it is not exactly laughter and tears but fire and ice of the most tangible kind. When you see love course through your veins, burning you with a degree of conviction that would put sanity to shame.- the insane, reckless abandon with which you see yourself burn every moment, every second and you still don't want to back out.

and there exists a very thin line, a small glimmer of light between this kind of love and that. Of course, there are armed sentries posted at every corner, silently waiting for you to take the plunge.

Not again.

These days are a mad jumble of highs and lows, spent in a reckless almost bordering on irreverent ,lassitude. I really do not know where to place the comma accurately so I chose to so arbitrarily.You have every allowance to read this as a  valiant attempt to dismantle Order and embrace Anarchy.
I do not know what i want anymore and this is a very scary, unsettling position to be in. I feel strangely anchorless and devoid of any coherent emotion. Everything seems oddly syncretized together like all the minerals and nutrients so effortlessly packaged in one tiny capsule promising cure for a dozen ailments. Everything seems to be striving to find some semblance of Order against all the jarring disorderliness. Being a literature student , i could locate all this hybridization of emotions with obscure theories like Globalization and Acculturation and feel strangely competent and secure in my resourcefulness. Of course, all of this is utter crap- the sheer naivete of an urgent desperation to reclaim one's dwindling Self-belief. I have an exam today. This should explain the desperation of using heavy sounding jargon-realities of which doesn't really live up to all that eloquence. okay, all this act about Globalization and other such cultural nonsense was just a note to Self to get back to what I should really be doing at this strange hour of the morning.
Everything seems predictably silent at this hour. There seems to be Peace, rather some poor substitution of it. It all feels so despairingly delicate and fragile like thin shards of coloured glass that prickles when you accidentally step on it but crumbles under your feet. Poise or the lack of it. This Mind is a curious tangle. If I were not Me, I would have loved to inspect this Madness with more clinical precision.  It is strangely heartening to see how I can make such a fetching display of my Ignorance with such casual disregard. And the best part is there won't be too many people reading my nocturnal rantings, so i can afford to duck and silently creep away with some dignity intact. Not that I care much but one must always put up a  Show and it is only much more convenient to pretend to care, to glaze one's meaningless monologue with some semblance of  normative behaviour.
In other news, Love and Life makes for an extraordinary pair. Both can be transmuted into the other with such simplistic resolve that it almost becomes an oddity to talk about such fancy words with that convincing degree of reverence intact. Life is one big never ending extended joke. You just need to figure out how to laugh at the right moment. Love makes that laughter so much easier.

i can't help but crack up inside as to how dreadfully impersonal and vague i can afford to be on this blog.
On second thoughts, I wish i could really write about things that really matter.

zzzz..

There is that familiar feeling of lethargy sweeping over me, even as i settle down rather recklessly on my desk  to type this out.  But today, there is a purpose to this rambling. I am not going to rant about my sedentary life for a change. This life which is eminently magnanimous keeps giving you chances at redemption. Some are agile-running along dexterously from one check point to another while others saunter lazily down the hallowed lanes. They are the passive bystanders in this spectacular event where the more agile ones continually keep goading themselves to Victory.
Nonetheless even these anonymous bystanders ambling along at their own leisurely pace get a chance to salvage their ephemeral sense of  Self. After a series of missed chances and inability to comprehends targets, one day, just like that one ends up hitting bull's eye.
 Of course, it has to happen when you least expect it, when you are prodded into believing that it can never happen. It is particularly important that it leaves you shaking in utter disbelief. It is next to impossible to reaffirm a dwindling self belief in wake of full consciousness. This reaffirmation steeps into your being rather covertly when you are overtly assured of  impending failure.

Nothing at all.

Another year gone by. in a flash. sublimated  into tiny sparkling beads of angst and apprehension-irrational joy and wanton sorrow. sense and senselessness.yearnings for the warm sanctity of familiarity. this soul craves too little and risks too much.need to believe, hope and fight.

give me the reassurance that you will be there without my having to demand anything at all. that you won't leave me again and that i don't need to cry again and again. that you will understand and accept the imperfect me.this tired, fatigued Self seeks regeneration and a little bit of accommodation.give me the reassurance that we will survive all the turbulence and emerge stronger in Spirit-just like before.give me the strength to believe that you will protect this, no matter what vicissitudes fall upon us.let me hold on to the faith that our connection will ultimately validate and transcend all differences and disagreements.make sure you say all of these with your air of clinical precision intact. don't falter in speech.that would kill me.
if my words mean anything to you, i would not have the necessity to speak, the urgency to write.you would just know irrespective of my having said anything to you.

okay, i realize none of it really makes much sense.but i honestly don't care what does. so there.

Blah.

There are certain excesses I wish I could dispense with, to commensurate a mythical Balance in my Head. Too much of reading  and fantasizing about contrived, plotted situations hinders you from thinking and enslaves you into simulating what you know is not your thought,your word,your belief. It impinges on your moral sanctity and lays siege to your Intellect. You are actually a harlequin in a greater pantomime that is beyond your comprehension. You vicariously lead an existence which bemuses you into believing that you are a prepossessing interlocutor, contending big, weighty questions that have the immense potential to change the contours of the universe.
Of course it is all happening in your head- to assuage your dwindling self belief and ephemeral will power. There is a greater drama going on there that you are obviously not aware of. You are cuddled into believing you are destined for something great when the internecine forces are vying with one another to corner you at the next signal. Haha. this is the moment when you look all smug and say "i told you so."


There is a test today at precisely 12:50 pm. of course, too much of reading has caused this epiphany.Need to go and sleep.

Something that rankles deep down.

I was recently talking to this perfectly, enterprising departmental senior of mine who had shifted to Delhi and had lost a miraculous amount of weight.  Losing "miraculous amount of weight" almost gives out the essence of him severing chunks of flesh from his corporeal self. It does sound gross but this is the first impression i got when i suddenly chanced upon him yesterday. Now, i have been obsessing bout losing weight for some months to no avail. My sedentary state of mind, much to my chagrin, does not quite allow the notion of hyperactivity. However, i was not going to let this chance go before finding out what 'miracle' made him lose weight so drastically. So our seemingly innocuous and banal discussion started on this strain and drifted completely into uncharted territories. There were a hundred things racing in my mind at the end of it-things that i did not tell him or anyone else. In response to my question of what 'miracle' had made this seemingly impossible task  possible, he had responded by how he has developed this habit of going for long walks and also how he has been running regularly-yes, right in the midst of busy Delhi streets, jostling clueless pedestrians, upsetting vendors,  eve-teasers and such likes.
He was also kind enough to suggest that now since he is in Calcutta (till next week) and we are practically neighbours, i could accompany him while he is walking/running. Now my eminently enterprising senior had bailed me out of sticky academic situations in the past, had patiently explained abstract concepts  and  critical, literary theories over telephone, had solemnly endured my relentless idiocy during long, never-ending bus rides from Jadavpur to salt lake and had also kindly escorted me to British council and American Center because i wasn't comfortable travelling alone.Of course things changed after he shifted to St Stephen's for Masters, For one, i only go to British council and American Center on Saturdays when Ma is at home and the car is therefore available. I am still not comfortable commuting alone.
Okay, so obviously i agreed to the plan-the running and the walking that is but something else nudged me at the back of my head, something that had been suppressed( or at least, i thought so) but reared it's ugly head again. I was silent.What bout when he was not here? what bout when he is back in Delhi?
It really isn't easy to figure out, why this unnecessary thrust on always having to have some company or other while travelling and why this stress on always having to be chaperoned by someone physically superior. Why this unflagging, almost dogged necessity to be always surrounded by people you know and people you can somewhat trust, if one hasn't ever experienced what most girls tend to experience, when they are barely mature enough to understand, to what extent things can actually go wrong with them.
As a child, i always loved walking.Alone, that is. I still do, somewhere i want to believe.
So i would disappear for hours at a stretch.No one worried because they all knew i was responsible enough to not stray too far and be back home before it was too late. i would disappear, armed with a book and an ancient Walkman.I never cared bout the way i looked.Uninhibited, i was always eager to discover unfamiliar paths to house my own imaginative world, peopled with 'my people'. i would aimlessly wander down meandering, pebbled roads that drew up dust as i uncouthly stepped on the frayed edges, discovering covert ribbons of thin,ephemeral streams.yes, places like that did exist in Salt lake of my childhood. i would marvel at my discoveries with childish enthusiasm, coloring my imagination with fragmented, disconnected characters from my books that inhabited these hidden nooks and crannies.Ecstatically,i would trace patterns on the wet earth, fumbling about for lost treasures and surreptiously hidden clues.There would be a spring in my step as i would joyfully find my way back home after a hard day's work.
Matter of Time. The bubble had to burst. My idyllic world had to come crashing down.
i was twelve. i hadn't done well in my half-yearly exams. Ma had been shouting for the last two days. I unceremoniously banged the entrance door and departed, fuming in anger for one of my favourite reveries. By then, there weren't many new places left to be explored. The foundations of City Center, Salt lake had just been laid, so that entire area was in a veritable mess. I still marvel, as to how that pile of rubble of my childhood managed to look so sophisticated later on.

i was walking down this deserted stretch near GD block, when i felt something brush past me. Shock and humiliation took over.The culprit whispered something unintelligible in my ears, I couldn't figure it out exactly but it did sound humiliating to my childish years.I started running. He kept up with me and brushed past me again. By then we had entered the main thoroughfare. Before, i could scream he dispersed into oblivion. i still remember his face and can probably recognize him, if i do happen to come across him again. There is unfinished business to take care of.
i remember feeling dizzy, my heart pounding  as i desperately ran down the streets.By then the initial wave of humiliation that had previously taken over had conglomerated into a pool and settled down at the base of my stomach. There was a queasy feeling, as raw anger and humiliation overlapped and rose up my throat. I felt my fist clench and a feeling of helplessness take seize.i entered the safe haven of my room and dissolved into tears. Ma thought, i was merely upset bout my dismal results. i remember not being able to behave normally for days.i just hated the sight of the boys in my class.For all i knew, they might grow up to be as reprehensible as that stinking man in the deserted alley.i was also new to the school at that time and had already been labelled as as a snob.i could not really figure out what had exactly happened with me and why it had to happen.i was too young and i wasn't aware of adult words like 'molestation'. i did not have the courage to narrate this incident to my mother, fearing she would never let me go out alone again.i myself did not have the courage to venture out alone anymore.
Everything changed since then. i became inhibited, more conscious, started taking my mother's warnings more seriously and began dressing in loose, ill-fitting clothes.I would be scared to make eye-contact with people when i was out in the streets and would quietly finish my work and run back to the shelter of my home. Over time, i had this select friend circle comprising mostly boys. Friends who were more like brothers. Their protective presence was like an aegis, shielding me from roving eyes and groping fingers. Of course, there have been more incidents like that one as i grew up but i also became more mature and learnt to handle things on my own.
Now the idea of walking alone, brought this painful memory back again. i was just twelve then. My childhood had been nipped into the bud. That initial wave of humiliation stills exists when something like that occurs.I always believed that my diminutive, childlike appearance would protect me from such incidents but i have been proven wrong time and again.Today something rankles in me, when i remember this incident, not just the filthy nature of the act but how inevitably natural it seems in our present surroundings.Every girl has to experience something like this at some point. It is terribly wrong and inhuman. It just makes me helpless as to how distorted and convoluted the perpetrators of such acts are.
Twelve is too young a age to be initiated into this cruel jungle and gain access to the knowledge that nothing would ever be the same again.

Random

These days Sleep kicks in, clawing it’s way through like an unannounced, unwanted guest tracing intrusive patterns in my sedentary life. It is extremely disheartening the way I end up feeling drowsy and lethargic at unexpected times of the day. I always knew I had erratic sleeping patterns but this is something I had never accounted for in my 21 years. Ma says, it is perfectly natural and nothing surprising, considering the fact I am directionless, unfocussed and forever befuddled. Not to forget unorganized. But then again Ma has been associating such adjectives with pretty much everything about my life for as long as I can remember. I daresay, even at fifty I shall remain all the above in her eyes. Come to think of it, going by the kind of discursive life I am leading right now, such a contention seems hardly out of place.

So be it. At fifty, I would be old, with sagging skin and wrinkles crisscrossing my forehead, dozing off when the world was pottering about, trying to prove it’s worth.
okay, it is such a pain to type out directionless, rambling sentences. Everything is redundant and every damn thing so useless.i have been at the key-board for the last five minutes, lazily fiddling with random keys, trying to string together formless, shapeless, disconnected thoughts.i notice tiny specks of dust have settled in the edges, lending my old, battered key-board a degree of familiarity that nothing in the world can replace. These days, i am scrounging around, desperately clinging onto whatever remnants of familiarity i can scavenge from all the disorderliness. everything changes too fast. It is such a pain to hold on when everything is being devoured up in a swirling whirlpool of Change.
Constancy, be thy name is Woman.
i think i shall go sleep now.

Sit still.

I don't know why today I can't sit still at one place even for a moment. Even this, I am not being able to type in peace.  I feel oddly incapable of gathering my thoughts.  I haven't experienced such a degree of derangement in a long time. I do not know if this is a good sign.

Duuh, obviously that is because you are getting saner with each passing second. relax!

It is like, I close my eyes, real tight and I see this hazy, kind of sparkly fluorescent neon lights glaring back at me, grinning toothlessly in an alternating rhythm- a little bright, brighter, dim, dimmer and then Explode. I am drowning. I feel this undulating rhythm taking over me-sometimes a rage and then a warm, fuzzy afterglow the next instant and then again leaving a bitter acrid taste. It is not humanly possible to make sense of what I am feeling right now. I am greatly perplexed myself. I open my eyes and there are these dull splotches of colour staring right back impishly. It is all within me. The sound is deafening. I close my palms, clench my fist and feel my heart leap. Some tiresome being is weeping incessantly alternating between vociferous bawls and muted spasmodic pangs. It is all disturbing. Must there be a pattern here also? I am tired of patterns. I find myself whispering please in order to placate my trembling heart. I need to retreat. And then I am cowering under the altar, pleading redemption.

        

       'We were talking-about the space between us all

And the people-who hide themselves behind a wall of illusion

Never glimpse the truth-then it's far too late-when they pass away.

          Try to realize it's all within yourself

No-one else can make you change

And to see you're really only very small,

And life flows ON within you and without you.   '

Okay, relax now. Everything is fine.

To frame or not to frame.

Another empty frame stealthily creeps in. Unmistakably black against the white light. Before I can hastily grab  and  immortalize 'that' picture or 'some picture', it fades again, unmistakably white- against a black light this time.Tired and befuddled.The scent however lingers in the wake of all this mindless commotion.it happens all over again. and again. The same process repeated down to the minutest detail. Empty frames flit in and out.
  I have stopped counting the number of failed attempts to immortalize 'my picture'. An opportunity lost is lost forever. Maybe it was never meant to be.My picture was forever flawed. i did not realize it before. Now that i know,does it change anything? Does all this empty commotion have a far greater significance that eludes my immature, impractical being.? Maybe it is time to jettison all that excess baggage which has been weighing down on my diminutive frame,for what seems like ages now.
or maybe I need to simply walk that extra mile, carrying that extra baggage till I reach that state of coherence when I can discard it all with with eloquent ease-and with one sweeping stroke of my paintbrush give the finishing touch to my picture which had always been in the process of formation. just that I with all my whining and ceaseless complaining never realized it.
I can frame 'my picture' then.
.

Reading.

I have been reading. Reading quite a lot these days.Reading anything that has text on it.
Reading jerks you back to your senses, wrests emotions that were lurking all along, stultified into oblivion in that cobwebby part of your mind. Emotions that you had no idea, existed comes tumbling forth in the wake of such impassioned, frenzied perusal and weaves itself into eloquent reasoning or at least that is what one would like to believe it is.

In this welter of mind numbing logic and oddly misplaced burst of intellectualism, it is difficult to winnow out specious reasoning, waxing eloquent under a rich fabric of sophistry.It is perfectly natural to start housing beliefs that are in reality baseless and convoluted.How does one guarantee the moral veracity of what one is reading?

Some writers are inherently dogmatic.He will rest only when his writing is singled out for Nature's greatest approbation.Till the time it happens, he is wont to polemical contentions, all adorned in artistic brilliance.He will vehemently continue endorsing his beliefs, his muscles taut under the wake of frenzied writing, till he finds the necessary acceptance.
 I realize i am catering to a very parochial idea of authorship here.

And of course there are people like me who shall hungrily lap it all up and after having whetted her appetite to the point of satiation, would instinctively discard it all for other banal things.
I have not experienced such a degree of emotional involvement with text in a long time. This is a good feeling. Such is Life.