Requiem For a Dream

So, a lot has happened since the time I last posted here. Indian cricket has hit its nadir, Vidya Balan has created Bollywood history of sorts (go girl, go!), UP has just passed from one set of thugs into the hands of another, and Rahul Dravid did the only thing any dignified individual should do.

I didn’t watch the test series against either England or Australia, though I did hear abt them and later, read their coverage. I don’t know if you’ll call me a pessimist, but to me these twin series marked the end of an era, a golden age in Indian cricketing history that for me began not with our Wold Cup victory in 1983, but with that memorable test victory against Australia in 2001. Harbhajan Singh created history during that series and nobody could quite comprehend then captain Sourav Ganguly’s strange fixation on this spinner. For me, that test series has always been abt one thing alone - possessing ‘balls of steel’ - something which I consider as Ganguly’s legacy to Indian cricket. Does that mean I am belittling the efforts and achievements of the other players like Tendulkar, Dravid, Laxman and Kumble ? No way.

All these players epitomise the joy of watching cricket for people of my generation; of uplifting a beleaguered team to its moment of glory. To claim, as some do, that its only moment of glory was lifting the World Cup last year, is foolish. Excellence takes years to come by; it is a by-product of a manic desire to hold the bull by its horns; and of an unquenchable thirst. Once you have sat at the bar drinking the finest liquor, no matter how badly you crave a drink, thirst is only an idea, a vague concept. So, no, I am not going to write off our current players, nor am I saying that they are at fault for playing too many matches or being involved in too many endorsements. They are just not thirsty anymore. Enough said.

The newspapers are full of columnists playing tribute to one of India’s finest batsmen. As I read them, I am filled with a deep sadness: maybe Dravid is a greater player than Ganguly after all. Look at the outpouring of genuine admiration! I am simply blown away by Rahul Bose's tweet, "Rahul Dravid reflects an india that is honourable, ethical, hardworking, and thoughtful."

Please note that I use the word greater and not better. Greatness is not a mere matter of statistics; it is a holistic concept of hundreds of minute qualities and habits and choices and achievements and decisions that define a person and his legacy. It is the goodwill that a person leaves behind when he’s no longer around.

In an odd way, it seems befitting that I write about my favourite sport in such elegiac terms today. The past few weeks signified the passing of an era in a personal sense too. But let's not talk abt it today.

Perhaps my next post will be abt a good book or film; perhaps it will be a long rant about uncouth Indians who rush into the elevator as if there’s a fire raging behind them; or maybe I will end up telling you why I think Barack Obama should kick Biden's ass and nominate Hillary as second-in-command; or maybe I will just tell you abt the time the world fell apart and the plate slipped from his hands as he looked on with helpless anguish.

Inspiration

Failing and Flying

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It's the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was 
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars 
burning so extravagantly those nights that
anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation, the gentleness in her
like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back
through the hot stony field after swimming,
the sea light behind her and the huge sky
on the other side of that. Listened to her
while we ate lunch. How can they say 
the marriage failed? Like the people who
came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph.


by Jack Gilbert

*******************************************************************


Together

I cannot do without you I think,

as I listen uncomprehending to their words

tumbling out quicker than diamonds,
out of a bandit’s purse string.

Eager promises, stupid condolences,

Earthy philosophy they offer too.

I turn a deaf ear and cast my mind

To times when you were my sound.

Speaking on my behalf, knowing

 their stares alone would bring a silence profound.

I was told it would be impossible

To live under the same roof.

Never once did you complain

As I read late with the light on,

When your speakers blared, not once did I frown.

Perfect harmony is made up
of two of a kind.

At the busy corners, my hands and lips,

Would beat a wild stacatto,

in sync with the tap of your stick on the ground.
As you held my hand,

Often I asked, ‘what’s on your mind’?

They asked me what did
it all amount to?

Sight and sound and amber

and incense and fulfillment and knowledge

that i was not alone. 
Reading lips, fleeting touches,

The letters in Braille,

Such was our holy grail. 

Ebar Ashi?

One of the things I love about being a Bong is our language: the melodious, clean , rounded sounds of our vowels and consonants, the forms of respect accorded to each address based on one’s relationship with the addressee, and the meanings behind names. I find great beauty in my language, little that I know of it. Often these days, I meet people, both in mumbai and kolkata, who are ashamed of speaking in the vernacular, who stubbornly answer in english even when you address them in bengali. I find it annoying. Anyway, that’s not why I started this post.

One of the pet Bengali phrases that was once commonly used and is slowly dying is ‘ebar ashi’. Used as a signature at the end of epistles, and also in speech, its direct translation would be, “now, let me come.” But it is actually a form of goodbye and the ‘ashi’ or ‘come’ is actually a promise to ‘return’ soon. Whenever we Bongs bid goodbye, we never say ‘jachi’ or ‘I’m leaving/going’. It is always, ‘ebar ashi’ – ‘let me go now so that I can return soon.’ More beautiful still is the ‘ebar ashi?’ - the question mark lends a dignity and sanction to the addressee that should be at the heart of all meaningful interaction. I don’t know if similar forms of leave-taking exist in other languages but I have asked my marathi and gujarati friends and it seems that they don’t have anything like this.

I don’t know anything about the genesis of my mother tongue so it leaves me free to imagine how things came to be. I imagine this graceful leave-taking must have its roots in the young boys who had joined the Swadeshi movement and who touched their mother’s feet and bid ‘ebar ashi’ before leaving their homes for the eternal home. Or maybe, it was the only consolation a husband could offer his wife as he left home to eke a living in some far off land. For, poignant as these moments must have been, can you imagine a more hopeful and pregnant goodbye than this?

Nobody

I learnt I am nobody

Did you too?

Why the pallor? Despair not.

There’s a pair of us yet.


Don’t show it,

That you have me around.

They’d banish us, you know,

Bury us underground.



Relish the thought,

You are invisible,

Truly free,

Neither the volcanic ash,

Nor the minstral, can stop your departure.



Didn’t you find it dreary,

To pose for the camera the livelong day?

To perfect the collagen pout,

And colour the hair,

Modulate your clear voice,

And tone your skin?



I know you did,

‘cause I did too.



Terrible it is to be somebody!

How like a frog

To tell your name the livelong day

To an admiring bog!

As If ...

The only reading I’ve done this week is of tributes on and articles by Christopher Hitchens. One particular piece has stayed in mind. Almost everyone who knew Hitchens seems to unanimously nod their heads that the man was larger than life - everything about him vital, virile, articulate, bursting with energy, both pugnacious and kindly. That even esophageal cancer, one of the most painful forms of the disease, didn’t quite ‘do him in’ is a testament to the man and his almost God-like resilience. His literary output continued unabated, he attended parties (unless he was hospitalised) and till the end, he loved nothing more than a good conversation: "For me, to remember friendship is to recall those conversations that it seemed a sin to break off: the ones that made the sacrifice of the following day a trivial one." He also once said that smoking and drinking were stimulants in a conversation and he remained unapologetic till the end about both habits.

In one of his last columns Hitchens wrote, ‘Like health itself, the loss of such a thing can’t be imagined until it occurs.” Here he is talking about the loss of speech. When the radiation started, one day he discovered that his “voice suddenly rose to a childish (or perhaps piglet-like) piping squeak” and he was no longer “able to stop a New York cab at 30 paces” nor could it like before, “without the help of a microphone, reach the back row and gallery of a crowded debating hall.” Despite the casualness of his delivery, his words tear you.

I’ve been wondering, what made the man tick? Suddenly, two scenes came to mind: one from Polanski’s The Pianist and the other from Milos Foreman’s One flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

One way of accepting life is to look upon it as a series of gains and losses: as Divine retribution and reward; sometimes deserved, often random. He didn’t really deserve to be kicked out of his job; she got what she deserved when she visited him; they really deserved to win the award - that kinda thing. What happens afterwards? What went on in Hitchens’ mind as the nurse left after injecting the last shot of the day, after the drapes had been pulled, and his last visitor left with hollow words of ‘let’s catch up soon’. How did he pull himself up, and fight his way to the table and struggle with the keypad to produce those glorious last articles? What stuff is man made of? I can’t presume what motivated him; such men are special. Genius always is. But for the rest, the antidote surely must be in a state of ‘As If’.

The people in the Kolkata hospital who went to get well and encountered a sickening reality, what must be going through the minds of their family? Life is not fair; that’s the single, indisputable reality of our lives. The world which we permeate has the power to shape us and unmake us. When this familiar, comforting world crumbles, all known edifices of honesty and kindness disappear. This is when it is important we create a state of As If: to believe that the number tattooed on your wrist, doesn’t make you any less human, any less an individual, than the German officer who looks at you coldly; to believe that the death of your child makes you no more responsible than God who didn’t listen to your prayers; to understand that irrespective of it being labeled a flower without roots, it did change you forever.

The two scenes below describe this state of As If. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve viewed these scenes over this year. Enjoy.






*******************************************************

One Last Breath - RIP Chris

When certain events unfold, they say Nature joins in the mourning. Flowers bend their heads, birds forget their music, and the musk deer loses her fragrance. I'm sure something like that happened today, for as i suddenly looked up from the computer screen, i was startled by the darkness outside. Rainfall in December in Mumbai? C'mon! Then my eye caught sight of the news. Everything fell into place. Why not? After all, 2011 didn't spare many.

While I didn't always agree with some of his views, I couldn't help but be dazzled by the clear, cold logic of his reasoning; his wit; his unequivocal support for the values he believed in, and his unflinching commitment to calling a spade a spade, diplomacy be damned!

He was often in the news for his controversial views on Islamofaschism, his support of the invasion of Iraq, and his disbelief in God. I'd like to believe, the man possessed a heart too large and an imagination too liberal  to accommodate our puny definitions of God. In his own way, he was a greater believer than either you or me.

If you haven't read him before, this would be a good place to start: where he knew the end had begun. And yes, do please read this too: a smack reply to all those who offer glib platitudes in the face of cosmic helplessness.

RIP
********************************************************************

Notes on Great House

I’ve never fought an impulse to abandon a book or film simply because it was wrapped in a brocade of endless gloom and grief. Nicole Krauss’ Great House is an aberration. I wanted to read this book when i learnt it was one of the finalist's in the 2010 National Book Awards, and also because her first work had swept me away. Of course, grief is as distinct from sadness as french fries from potato wedges. But Krauss’ Great House really tested my limits because despite the shining luminosity of her expressions, there were sections when I felt compelled to put my book down and move on to a James Patterson thriller! The reason I mention this at the onset  is because this is not a book most people will enjoy.

Does that mean I don’t recommend it? If you have an ear for music, if you don’t mind solitude, and if you are not impatient with those who couldn’t make it to the finishing line, read it. You will discover an author whose sheer mastery of emotions and language will leave you blinded. After Arundhati R0y’s God of Small Things, I have rarely come across such aplomb & aptness in language. Try this: "In life we sit at the table and refuse to eat, and in death we are eternally hungry."

Like its delightful predecessor, Great House also revolves around an inanimate object and reveals how the lives of separate people in diverse locations are tied together through this object. In the former novel it was a missing manuscript, here it is a mammoth desk: “an enormous, foreboding thing that bore down on the occupants of the room it inhabited, pretending to be inanimate but, like a Venus’ flytrap, ready to pounce on them and digest them via one of its many little terrible drawers.”

The story is told by four narrators – Nadia in NY, Isabel in Oxford, Arthur in London & Aaron in Jerusalem.  

Nadia, a writer, begins the story by recounting how the desk came her way. She addresses her story to a silent witness who she calls ‘Your honour’ and whose identity is only revealed in the final pages. We learn that she was left the desk by a young Chilean poet named Daniel Varsky who was leaving for home and needed a place to store his furniture. Soon afterwards Daniel falls a victim to Pinochet’s murderous regime and the desk remains with Nadia. Despite its foreboding presence, she forms a strange attachment with it as she continues to write at the desk. She remains unmarried and detached from any real human connection, and the desk and her brief encounter with Varsky seem to be the only milestones in her emotional landscape - "I'm embarrassed to say that my eyes actually filled with tears, Your Honour, though as is so often the case, the tears sprang from older, more obscure regrets i had delayed thinking about, which the gift, or loan, of of a stranger's furniture had somehow unsettled."If there is no great exhilaration in her life, there is also no deep sorrow. Until the day Leah Weiz knocks on her door claiming to be Varsky’s daughter and requesting the desk back.

The next part of the story is told by Aaron, the recently widowed father of Dov, who he addresses through his monologue. Aaron is in fact the single character in this book who seems intent to redeem himself, who is aware of his severed connection from his own blood and is desperate to find common ground again with Dov. His anguish, his fury, his sense of utter desolation that no matter how hard he tries, he cannot scale the impenetrable wall that Dov has built around him, comprise some of the most beautiful sections of this novel.

We next meet Arthur Bender, who has only recently discovered (while caring for his Alzheimer-afflicted wife Lotte Berg) the extent of the secrets she kept locked within her self during their long marriage. It is in fact Lotte, who’d given the desk to Varsky.  As these stories unravel, you realise neither Dov nor Lotte nor Nadia are ordinary people who look for and cherish concepts like stability, love or happiness. They are consumed by memories of a loss so immense that it makes it difficult to stand straight afterwards. Yet, what is truly painful is Krauss’ intuitive understanding of the unhappiness that falls upon those who are attached to these broken figures. As Arthur describes his long marriage, we realise the long periods of uncertainty, the endless doubts, and the effort required to silently accept the whims and silence of Lotte without ever voicing what it must’ve cost him to live like that. In many ways, Arthur reminds me of Tagore’s Nikhil from Ghare Baire.

The fourth narrator is Isabel, a student at Oxford who falls in love with Yoav Weisz, Leah Weisz’s brother. Like Arthur and Aaron, Isabel too soon discovers the pitfalls of caring deeply for someone whose entire life is in the thrall of something greater than himself – in this case the siblings’ unusual and disturbing closeness, and the presence of their domineering father George Weisz. George is a famous antiques dealer who specialises in restoring old pieces of furniture looted by the Nazi’s to their rightful owners. Needless to say, George wants the desk. As George explains his peculiar occupation to us, we seem to glimpse what lies beneath Krauss’ magnificent meditation on loss and grief.

George Weisz says, “Bend a people around the shape of what they have lost, and let everything mirror its absent form." His words are at complete odds with our commonplace understanding of grief and loss. We think (that’s what is taught and  that’s what we witness in most around us) that time and life are the greatest healers; that with time, it is possible to overcome, or at least noticeably ‘move on’ from the epicentre of one’s great loss. This may be true of most. But the reverse is also true – that there may be some who simply do not have this faculty of self healing; who stand rooted in the quicksand of their loss and defeated by time; there is a kind of soil which no matter how much you water or fertilise, will yield no fruit. And this brings us to, perhaps, the book’s great existential question – if such loss is a definite possibility in one’s life, how does anything really matter? How do we lend meaning to the concepts and constructs that are purportedly meant to make life meaningful?

According to Joan Didion the answer lies in writing: ‘you write your way through it’ she prescribes of crushing grief. Krauss is far cannier and offers nothing. There is no hope, no comfort, no light at the end of the novel: just shattered glass.

As I read Great House I found myself impatient to see how the 4 stories would come together. Readers who expect neat endings will probably be a little miffed at Krauss for the manner in which this is done. I think this is also a deliberate ploy on her part because to search for meanings and connections in a merciless existential universe is perhaps as futile as trying to comprehend God.