Wednesday, February 21, 2024

..that we sometimes choose not to

Meaning-making is an artisinal activity.

I jumped off a plane earlier this week. From 15000 feet. Had a freefall of about 60 seconds and then a few minutes of flight under the canopy. It was good, had a few moments of intense experience, including that of fear and exhilaration, but for the most part it seemed a pretty normal affair. I wasn't nervous or initimated before, nor stunned or deeply moved after. The same happened with the bungy jump and rafting in a river with apparently grade 4 rapids. Not that I had spectacularly high expectations nor an anticipation for epiphanies before signing up. After years and years of seeking life-transforming enlightenment from every unusual activity, over the last couple of years I've stopped worrying about that and started enjoying activies for their immediate, visceral pleasures. But that feeling of, if not quite meh then, only naice prompted me to question my motives for signing up for activities like these, and the marathon and the upcoming Spartan Beast. After a couple of days of mind-wrangling, I arrived at a seemingly sensible conclusion.

For starters, at this point I'm not bothered by the gap between what people portray on social media and the reality of experience itself- that is zameen aasmaan ka faraq. It is not always that the poster or the responder wants to exagerrate or embellish but I think 1. instagram, among others, is a spectacularly unsuitable medium for genuine human connection and communication, and 2. we have so corrupted our vocabulary and cultural milieu by calling many, many things awesome or incredible or amazing that in some perverse way our lives have become stunted and incapable of seeking and identifying the truly magnificent. Not that that wasn't always the case with language anyway- the gaps between what people truly felt (if it could even be stored and accessed accurately), how they communicated (both the conscious and inevitable corruptions) and how the receiver understood it (with their biases and imaginative vasanas)- but in a sense modern social media, the way we publish and consume with a proclivity for touched up images and a certain type of YOLO captions, seems to have fucked up our Bullshit Detection apparatus. Thankfully, I also think we are adaptive as individuals, and in groups, and we've managed to upend The Algorithm's hold on us by creating tools, both intellectual and social, to help us cope and thrive in those limited spaces.

Anyway, back to the point. There are atleast two aspects to my lacklustre responses. The good part is that we've advanced so far as a society that activities as mind-boggling as jumping off a plane from 15000 feet have become so commonplace that millions of people have done it. There is ofcourse the immense advances in science and engineering that have made the activity safe and predictable. But there are also advances in economics, management and philosophy, that have led me to trust absolute strangers with my life in doing such risky acts. This normalisation is not to be taken lightly. For the good and the bad, we are in many ways a hive mind. The standardisation of protocols across the globalised world, that initially made trade, then communication, now finally movement of people so seamless, interoperable, has led us to a place where people are able to plug and play their skills, ways of communication, and money to make things happen cheaply, efficiently and safely. Over the last few years of readings and listenings, I've come to appreciate and embrace trade. 

Now, to the deeper concern- If even jumping off a plane won't excite my jaded sensory, emotional, intellectual and, is this the only word?, spiritual facets, what will? Again, let me clarify. Its not that it wasn't fun or exciting, especially the bungy because there I more or less had to take the plunge myself. Its that the bang for the buck, if even that's the right way to approach it, was far lesser than what I'd been led to believe from other peoples' narratives and images. Yes, it is a problem with my expectations and seekings in life but I suspect the same is true for many other people. That led me to question why I travel and sign-up for activities like these and seek art, food and other experiences. It is undeniable that atleast one part of it is motivated by public-facing narrative-making: for some as images on instagram, for me as ramblings on this blog. What Budugu recently referred to as a Social Media Resume. That is the performative aspect. But I think there is also this attempt at meaning-making and transcendence that is provided short shrift by a certain exaltation of these activities. I don't think our lives, atleast my life and my activities, will somehow make more sense by embracing what advertising, both the industry as well as people regurgitating those tropes, is constantly exhorting me to. I was clear about it with respect to buying a house, a luxury car, starting a family etc. Now I'm beginning to think the same applies, if only to a lesser extent, to the experience-industry. It is a difference only in order not in kind. Again, I'm forced to repeat, its not that this wasn't a great holiday or I didn't have a great time. Its that when it comes to finding whatever it is that I'm seeking most intensely (In typical millennial fashion, I don't know what it is but hope to recognise it when I find it), this is not the way to go about it. Investigating that a bit further, I think that at some point these things held something more than just pretty pictures and simplistic tropes but they've been sucked dry because of commodification.

This connects with my earlier point. If things are cheap, easily available and reliable because of commodification, then they also lose any semblance of personality, serendipity and mystery because of the same process. It is not a bemoaning as much as observation. Maybe it is not the smooth processing as much a residual desire for something magical that is the culprit here. Yet, if I do want feel something rawer, unprocessed, as-yet-uncommodified, then the onus is on me to leave the comfortable contours of the socially acceptable and celebrated (atleast my social-circlely lauded), and move into the deeper, unmarked waters. Ofcourse, it could end up horribly wrong (was my stumbling upon Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild in a Queenstown bookshop yesterday a beacon or an omen?) but that is the nature of that journey. 

In an appearance on Infinite Loops, Venkat Rao said that all the lamentation about the loss of meaning and a desperation for spiritual succour that people feel and that sends them to shrinks and gurus is, for the most part, a failure of nerve. To truly walk the uncharted path, one must be willing to be brave, to be wrong, to be reviled. That is where truly radical acts and new narratives come from. Ofcourse its worth questioning why I want to end up in places where no one has before. While there is definitely signalling, there is also the prospect of finding something valuable. For the most part, it is about touching something unsterilised, unpolluted, something firsthand rather than the normal way where I'm doused in people's opinions and judgements before even approaching the activity at hand, where I'm not walking in with my head, to use Sheldon Cooper's memorable phrase, preblown

Maybe it is a problem that only I have and everyone else is able to intuitively solve or mitigate it; Although I don't think other people don't see what I'm trying to get at here- it does seem like a pervasive feature of our culture. Be that as it may, I'm coming to the realisation that making sense of my life, finding clarity for my actions in an attempt at self-fulfillment, is a highly artisanal act. All the conveniences and mechanised productions that society has to offer will not solve that problem. I do think it is a good for society as a whole, we're better off as a species after every discovery, but as an individual, I'm forced even more to confront the interchangabiltiy of my being in the whole. Sometime ago, I said only half-knowingly that, "We are defined not by what we do but by what we resist". Rationality is a wonderful thing but by nature it can be transferred into a machine. It is irrationality, my particular kind of irrationality, that I have to embrace to remain an individual.

Saturday, January 27, 2024

fomo mofo

To be an intelligent, imaginative being, a human, is to be condemned to carry the burden of an ever-increasing weight of What-Ifs. Every decision I make forks into atleast two paths and while I, thankfully, don't have the cognitive capacity to keep a tally of all those possible paths, and their subsequent derivatives, nonetheless there remains this strong sense of missing out, of काश, of a shortcut that could've taken me to the destination (enlightenment? wealth? bliss?) faster than if I keep following the path I'm currently on. Venkat Rao once defined aptitude as how long it takes you to learn something. Probably owing to a residual of pop-Advaitam but I am fairly certain that I'll get there (wherever that is) eventually. My contribution is only limited to choosing the paths of most efficiency. 

The ostensible reason for getting on this train of thought is the MA course being offered by University of Silicon Andhra (that name is such a Gult fantasy boy!) that is being taught, among others, by Dr. Mrunalini garu for which Bujjimama had signed up, was encouraging Amma to apply as well, and so I was super tempted to do the same. Fortunately good sense prevailed, thanks primarily to Sravani's measured insistence that I sit on it for a few weeks and make sure it isn't another one of my temporary whims, and I decided to pass this cohort by and consider applying in August; Not before I had a conversation with Mrunalini garu during which I gushed breathlessly in an extended fanboy moment. But for the brief while I considered it, my mind went into a realm of fantasy about all the wonderful things I'd learn, the invigorating conversations, the poetry, the knowledge, the inspiration that would lead me to create an important, powerful cultural artefact. While this is a more dramatic example of that onslaught of feelings, I feel a version of the same whenever I open a new book or sit down to watch a film or even consider the best way to read- do I make notes on the margins, stop and write down in an app like Evernote or Roam (if so, what's the best way to leverage the myriad minor design choices), take notes towards the end to make sure my reading thread isn't broken, or abandon all these considerations and read it for the fun and see what sticks because, hey, isn't that the best way to pursue knowledge- with abandonment and a lack of greed. This literally goes through my mind all the time, as I feel a variant of this goes through yours too, and its exhuasting, boring, and positively detrimental to the exercise- but what exactly is the exercise? What am I trying to optimise? 

Marxian sociologists write about the nature of false consciousness- a rather bold claim considering my shallow readings on the internet, so please excuse the hubris temporarily- but is there anything but false consciousness; False consciousness-es all the way down. Having said that, there is also this desperate attempt to look into this space with these infinite nodes and find the set of connections that will create the path of most-efficiency/ least resistance. But again to where? Since I've convinced myself that there is no static, external reward, all these attempts at an increased performance are either attempts at social signaling or to test the limits of possibility. Sometimes, admittedly, they're for the inherent pleasure. That holds true for my upcoming attempt at the Spartan Beast, for an increasing inclination to make more money, to write/ film/ pod. That much is clear. Underlining all those desires is the desire for intense, new experience- to use the debauched vocab of Capitalism, to extract most from life. Naturally, it is extraordinarily hard to optimise when the end goal is so vague. Ever since I heard Prof. Alison Gopnik's superb conversation with Michael Garfield on Complexity, I've been trying to apply the Exploration/ Exploitation framework to my actions and that has slightly improved the way I deal with the tension between instant gratification and longer-term reward. The problem is there doesn't seem to be an optimal solution. Since I don't know what information I have encountered now, or would've encountered had I taken the other path, is going to be useful in the future, a part of me insists that I capture, classify and store everything I come across. However, there is this other notion that scoffs at being such a desperate bore (something I felt powerfully, rather unfairly?, when I heard this episode), and points, rather rationally, at the impossibility of capturing anything more than the tiniest of fraction of not just Assembly Possibles but also Assembly Contingents (for more on this nomenclature, please refer to this Lex Fridman conversation with Lee Cronin). In a sense, rationality, atleast the classical, engineering-style, bounded, won't be of much help here. Yet, it would be foolish, scary, and premature to give up hope and just follow my whims. Not least because that isn't giving me any pleasure or certainty (are they the highest aspirations I'm capable of?) anyway. What is to be done?

In this recent (oh! not-so-recent, I read it quite late then) jaw-droppingly brilliant essay, Venkatesh Rao uses Benjamín Labatut's (who's work I too highly recommend) stunning debut, When We Cease to Understand the World, to launch into an exploration of the nature of acquiring and using knowledge to act in the world, and goes onto convincingly show that the transformation from, to put it crudely, data -> information -> knowledge, i.e., something that is observed in the world to something that can be woven into a larger tapestry to understand higher order causes and emergences to finally something that can be conveniently handled and commodified and invisibilised so that it can be used to act and bring about changes in the world (and the self), is neither easy nor a linear progression nor always desirable or even possible. The successful paths create hard boundaries, the failures, and their unborn children, a sense of longing and melancholy.

I think the sufis and the spiritualists completely bypass (or transcend depending) this formulation because the difficulty (futility?) is obvious. They are able to, the real ones not the pretenders, short-circuit their rational faculty and/ or build such deep intuitions while also supressing their what-is-society-thinking parameters that they get there by some black box magic. For those of us obsessed with both wanting to achieve something incredible but also be witness to it but also do it in a way that society lauds us but also build the necessary vocabulary simulatenously to be able to articulate it, it is a much harder path- Refer in this essay to what Herzog has to say about Psychoanalysis.

The fomo though refuses to abate. I suppose the only way to go about it is to be both the bodhisattva and the carvaka. To be both in the knowing and the abandoning. కాఫ్మన్ పెద్నాన్న చెప్పినట్టు, Enjoy it. అంతకు మించి ఏం పీకలేవ్ for the house always wins.

What to do then? Go back to finishing the half-read book because that's the right thing to do, and it builds discipline etc. or skim through the magazine in search of something new, juicy, succinct? In a sense, you can't go wrong. Or rather, can't go right. Either action will add to that already large complex tree of the universe of all past decisions, and there will be regret irrespective of choice. Ofcourse, there seem to be lesser mistakes and greater ones, and I hope to one day build a mechanism to identify those, but for now it is sufficient to know that a large part of the problem isn't with the things I should've done but with the thinking at a point in time that takes me flying on those seas where the wistful waves roll. It is with both alarm and alacrity that I recognise myself growing middle-aged as I mutter under my breath the banal platitude- Embrace the Moment.

Friday, January 12, 2024

సముద్రం

In the secondhalf of Premam, when Nivin Pauly meets Madonna Sebastian in his bakery and she tells him that she's Celine, the kid who used to deliver his love letters, there is a moment when it hits him and as incredulity spurts on his face, his eyes widen, he gasps as his hand involuntarily goes to his mouth open in astonishment. It is an incredible shot and I remember shuddering in that instant. As I write this, I'm still getting little goosebumps of pleasure. Another similar, equally unexpected shot, was in 96 when the young Jaanu looks at the young Ram in their class. I don't remember what happens in the scene but the actor who played the young Jaanu pulled off that reaction with such panache that I gasped.

In Three of Us, which Sravani and I just finished watching, there is a scene when we are in Shefali Shah's POV as a distracted Jaideep Ahlawat walks out of his office, his mind elsewhere, and we wait with her for him to look at her/ us. Avinash Arun masterfully holds the shot, and there is a good 5-second stretch when Ahlawat is right at the centre of our attention but we're beyond his periphery. I was anticipating his expression but still let out a cry of joy when he finally looked into the camera and his face went through micro-adjustments, almost like a low resolution video upscaling into high resolution in real-time which was probably what was happening to the character internally as well as this face he hadn't seen in 28 years triggered such complex computations that he was utterly bewildered with the speed with which he time-travelled and incredulous at the barrage of feelings unleashed upon him1. In that moment, I fell in love with Jaideep Ahlawat. 

I've always been enamoured by him. From the moment I saw him in Gangs of Wasseypur, I've admired his screen presence. I was completely bowled over by him in Dipakar Banerjee's superlative film in Lust Stories, especially the scene where so ridicuously, so raucously, so inappropriately he and Sanjay Kapoor digress abruptly into the "Half fry, half fry, half fry" anecdote, and his face lights up as he bursts out laughing only to be as suddenly brought back to grimness and fear by Manisha Koirala's utterance. He was memorably good in Sandeep aur Pinky Faraar, and I beamed with pride (for having seen it before others?) as he was universally luaded for his performance as Haathi Ram in Pataal Lok. 

Yet what I felt today was different. It is what I felt when I saw Pankaj Tripathi in that kheer scene in Masaan. And with Irrfan Saab sometime during watching The Namesake for the first time. It isn't just admiration or awe for their art. I feel that almost always for Manoj Bajpai and quite often for Rajkumar Rao. Now as I write this, I realise that Gulshan Deviah falls between these two camps. Anyway, back to the love. It isn't respect and gratitude too. Like I feel for Vivek Sagar and Anurag Kashyap and Dibakar Banerjee and Vishal Bhardwaj and Javed Saab and Gulzar Saab and Richard Linklater and Charlie Kaufman and David Foster Wallace.. and others. I have no other word for it except love. And in true love fashion, it is not at the level of the oeuvre but simply at the level of the moment, impression, sensation. A mental photograph that becomes more and more loaded with every remembrance2. It is very hard to express or analyse or even justify it. As much as I loved him in Masaan and Newton, I don't find Pankaj Tripathi as endearing or convincing in his more recent performances. That phase is over. Nonetheless, it would be false to claim the moment didn't exist. I don't even know what it is exactly that I've fallen in love with- the genius of their acting where even as one is aware of the aspect of 'performance', one can't help but be affected by it3? Or rather by the naked, vulnerable humanity that peeks through all the craft? Or that I've identified/ aspired to be the character so much that I have the parallel epiphany? Or something else? 

I don't know the answer, and don't really want to know it either. I'm so glad though that I get to experience those moments. One should keep falling in love. I don't think one can stay in love, so our best case scenario is to keep falling in as often as we can. I am, for all practical purposes, an atheist. Yet, I don't think these moments are less religious, less transcendental than what's experienced by a believer. I'm a believer too- in the beauty and surprises and complexities and magnanimity of life.

1 "Reason is revelation from within; Revelation is reason from without" -From the gorgeously sophisticated thinker Waleed Aly's People Like Us

2 Amit Varma and his exposition on the recursive nature of memory

3 You might know full well that Wasim's now going to bowl the reversing yorker but still be helpless to defend against it

Thursday, January 11, 2024

a murmuration of starlings

In his biography of David Foster Wallace, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, DT Max writes that one of DFW's major preoccupations was with the unrelenting demand to perform in the Post-Modern age. That we are constantly looking at ourselves from others' eyes and the after a point the audience in the head refuses to leave forcing us to perform even when we're seemingly alone. As someone who has spent long hours interviewing myself in my head, I know that almost all narratives I create are for an audience. This thought came back to the foreground as I was listening to The Seen and the Unseen episode with the poet Ranjit Hoskote and Amit Varma asks him if he presupposes a reader for his poems during the act of writing. After which he reads out a poem based on Joseph Fasano's prompt on Twitter.

My name is virtue.

Today I feel like Performance Art,

    basking on the boulevard.

Sometimes I'm pretty,

    sometimes I'm grotesque,

        always I'm fake.

I ask the world,     

    How can I be me?

And the answer is

    Performance Art.

I was talking with Amma yesterday and when I said I now undertand the importance of hypocrisy for the functioning of society, she said I'd changed a lot compared to where I was 10 years ago. I agree with her; I would've been enraged if someone had told me that I was performing then, lecturing them about the importance of being authentic to oneself, but now I see it rather differently. Even if there is, deep within us, something essentially ourself, uncontaminated by the external world, beyond mimetic desires, is only that us and everything else not just fake but dangerous and distracting? Is that what the spiritualists claim atma to be? I spent a good part of my life, over a decade more or less, turning that question round and round in my head and didn't get anywhere close to an answer. If there indeed is a bedrock, I have not been able to reach it. Maybe it is 'Turtles all the way down'. I've stopped actively looking for it after reading Martijn Koning's Capital and Time because his explanation of the self-referentiality and 'strange loop'-y nature of money answered perfectly my questions around personality. Obviously, that book was the final straw and wouldn't have been convincing without the questions posed and answers sought across the decade. 

Thankfully, around the same time as I was reading the book, the unfailingly brilliant Rob Horning wrote a piece on social media asking the question, and I paraphrase, Why is it that we think that the first thought that pops into our head is the most authentic and everything else is either a compromise or corruption? Why is consideration, contemplation, deliberation, the decision to step back from expressing the first reaction not also part of ourselves? I can see Amma smiling as she reads this as this is exactly what she'd been trying to tell me for years. 

"Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist." -John Maynard Keynes

Maybe, infact, the first thought is an as-received, untreated remnant handed over by society, and the output after careful deliberation is more representative of your realer, deeper self- Kahnemanian System 1 and 2 framework?

While I understand this better now, my contention with Amma that not expressing not being the right response still holds. Over the years, I've grokked my way into the conviction that expression is not only important but fundamental to our relationship with the world. This is where the earlier aspect of performance ties in. Reading Anil Seth and Nicholas Humphrey and Daniel Dennett, among others, had brought the understanding that the our consciousness is not an insular entity (a problem DFW seems to have grappled with intensely and found respite in religious communion) but has to, and almost always does, interact with others', thereby evolving, transforming, and expanding. The eureka moment came on reading James Ley's astounding essay on SRB that, for starters, helped me get to the root of Sandeep Vanga's Animal better than any other piece I'd read but, more fruitfully, lead me to this quote from Mikhail Bakhtin's Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics-

An idea for Dostoevsky ‘is not a subjective individual-psychological formation … no, the idea is inter-individual and inter-subjective — the realm of its existence is not individual consciousness but dialogic communion between consciousnesses’. 

That finally brought this long-running chapter to a conclusion. That while we are incredibly bright and complex, and filled with information and emotions and insights and impressions individually, almost none of it makes sense outside the realm of human society and culture. We are a lot like honeybees, performing an elaborate dance not for ourselves but others. The cool part about being human is that sometimes it is for ourselves, or atleast the audience within. Yet, it would be foolish to pretend we can, or should, live away from all this mess; It is a mess only when we're not able to parse and compute- words that suggest both unhumanness and also something profoundly, proudly human. When we can, though, what glory and beauty, what grace.

If not anything else, this hypothesis definitely explains why I can't stick to writing notes with any regularity anywhere else but have continued blogging for, what, 15 years now!

Saturday, December 23, 2023

control, understand, adapt, repeat

 06/Dec/2023

 Two guys are standing in a long line outside the American consulate. 

"ఏ కాలేజ్?"
"ఒస్మానియా"
"నేను ఐఐటి  బాంబే.. జీఆర్ఈ ఎంత?"
"1200"
"నాది 1500.. బాంక్ బ్యాలెన్స్ ఎంత చుపిస్తున్నావ్?"
"౩౦ లక్షలు"
"నేను రెండు కోట్లు"
"లైట్ తీస్కో"  

Cut to them walking out. The IITian looks dejected as our hero taps him on the shoulder and asks, "వచ్చిందా?"

"లేదు స్కోర్ తక్కువని రిజెక్ట్ చేసారు. నీకు?"
"డౌ-ట?"
"అదేంటి, నీకన్నీ నాకంటే తక్కువ కదా?" 

At which our hero briefly pauses before landing the punchline, "నీకు వీసా రాకపోతే ఏం చేయాలో తెలీదు నాకు తెలుసు. అది తేడా."1

It is an anecdote that I've used repeatedly over the years, often in a jestful and self-elevating way, but occasionally also as containing a deep truth without being able to truly articulate what that truth is in any other way. I think its finally come to me- Control the Narrative. 

A couple of weeks ago I was bitching and moaning to Nathan about not being able to stick to the training plan. Its been a consistent problem with me (the only consistent thing about my training lol) where I'd have a 3 week period where I'm kicking all goals and am super pumped, followed by a 4-5 week period where I'm slacking off- demotivated, sore, lethargic and stressed about not keeping up. So I decided to create a SWOT chart and vowed to address the problem face on. Only, once I expressed my grand intentions and the self-examining I was willing to put myself through, waiting for Nathan to appreciate my appetite for the trurh as painful as it maybe, I got a proper dressing down. He seethingly told me what I was looking for a magic pill overrulling my objections that I was precisely doing the opposite- that I understand there was no magic pill and so was looking to analyse, understand and identify the root problem. His response was that there is no root problem, only the surface level problem of simply waking up everyday and sticking to the training plan. Simple, no need to psychoanalyse the self and read cutting edge research on behavioural science or whatever. The audience in me was disappointed but I didn't dare argue with him then. So for the last two weeks he's changed my plan into waking up at 5 and doing the training first thing in the morning. Don't worry about anything else- Just wake up and do what's written there. Don't worry if you think its too hard or easy, or what the area of focus is, or I'm in the mood to do the other training. Don't try to understand- just do. Obviously, the last two weeks have been amazing (otherwise all this setup wouldn't make sense would it), and for more reasons than one. There is ofcourse the aspect of Discipline being Freedom, and how infinite choice is a prison of sorts, and how what we think of free choice isn't always so, and I suppose all that is obvious. What I've been more amazed by is the positivity (damn, I'm turning middle-aged) brought into my life by gaining agency. Like Nate said last night, when you make a promise to yourself and stick to it, two things happen: Your self-respect increases and that's always good, but also there is a dopamine (or endorphin or whatever) rush that happens thereby improving your morale and making it easier for you to get more done. 

I have spent years of my life, either directly or obliquely, looking for the bedrock of principles, or some other non-negotiable maximums, on top of which I can build a robust structure that'll help me live a good (in all senses of the word) life. While I've had epiphanies, which gave the impression that I had deduced some such principle, they have proved transitory. Actually, I don't think they've been transitory. I almost never read older posts on this blog but I believe if I were to, I'm likely to find atleast 10 posts over the years written in a similar tone and with similar conviction. Infact, probably even saying very similar things. What has proved harder is to adhere to those learnings. Maybe it indeed has been the magic pill I've been seeking- that thing which'll change me so fundamentally that I won't have those minutes of self-doubt or lethargy or self-loathing or any such ever again2. And only age and experience3, the relentless cycle of trying, gaining, failing, retrying, that is finally convincing me that there won't be a eureka moment4. That it is everyday for itself.

In Capital and Time, a staggeringly dense book that nevertheless builds deep, interesting ideas beautifully and is written with panache, Martijn Konings explains how Money is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It is a post-modern construct of the highest order, self-reflexive and recursive, immaterial yet truly real, capable of bringing change in the world by literally betting on some things over others. The self, it seems to me, is like that; Only more so. We can't run entire on will or whims or some abstract innate moral code or maybe even the soul. At the same time, we do have agency, a unique perspective, and desires and feelings that are part-inculcated and part-intrinsic. The world decides a lot of things for us, not least the circumstances of when, where, how we are born. It gives us our station in life, and an incredible amount of biases, hacks, koans, concepts to use and abuse. Yet, that too isn't the whole story. Our self is, in a sense, manufactured. The brilliant conceit though is that there is no inert lab in which this happens. The partially created self keeps building, breaking, transforming, snapping back, drifting listlessly sometimes, capable of bending the world to its will at others.

None of this is new or interesting, even for me. The one difference seems to be is an understanding and appreciation of the nature of habit. After all the kicking and screaming, wishing and delusioning(!), I'm coming to an experiential understanding of the staggering power of habit. No deep, worthy change can happen in a short span of time. Not just because intertia and social mores are so strong, but also because motivation is a limited resource and runs out quite quickly.

1From Deva Katta's Vennela. Its probably not verbatim but I didn't want to go back and check.

2In an old talk, I remember Anand Gandhi asking, "Why do we expect that 26 letters in the alphabet will rearrange themselves in such a way one day that the answers to all our questions about the universe will be revealed?" I see his point but I think I'm too much of a language romantic to lose that hope- if not for truth, then atleast for beauty.

3Amma, I think you're right!

4Prof. Alison Gopnik says that humans have the Explore/ Exploit function built into them. Kids prefer explore while adults adjust for exploit. Maybe that is all there is to growing up really, a giving up on fantasising about elsewhere.

--

Things have changed somewhat since I wrote the above words a fortnight ago. After having important, kick-up-the-ass converstations with Amma, Sravani and others, I've had to modify the above hypothesis to handle relationships. While autonomy, accountability, repetition, planning and design, a certain kind of engineering mindset is required for achieving long-term goals, relationships can't thrive just on those precepts. I know it sounds ridiculously young-adulty5 but what can I do- I seem to need the constant reminders. Like I wrote in my Roam6 notes last night, relationships can't be solved or hacked in the cold waters of rationality, they need the grace and comfort of warm waters to blossom. Good faith, generosity, humour, a little self-deprecation and, yes damn it, love are what are required to navigate these waters. But it isn't just instrumental as navigation, it is more akin to sailing or swimming, the act itself being a major source of pleasure. Now, again, I don't want to give the impression that its been solved. Maybe reality will bring these assumptions into question, these tenets have to be modified/ abandoned/ held even more dearly. It does seem that there is no bedrock of principles, that while I must and will go deeper into my investigations, justifications, rationalisations, getting more and more nuanced, there will be no Platonic ideal that'll open a portal. It's a constant evolution.

Years pass and I seem to keep coming back to similar conclusions, if not the same ones. I don't know if that's a good thing or bad, and even if it were bad if I can do something about it. I don't think I'll be able to hack my way out of this jungle. I can't find this particular essay, and I'm kicking myself for not taking note of it when I read it, I read a couple of weeks ago that said something to the effect of, "Relentless self-reflection7 is not just useless but infact detrimental. Permuting and combining the same set of impressions, ideas, memories etc. (data points) over and over again does not necessarily lead to understanding or epiphany. But they can be done inexhuastibly and let one escape from having to look out into the world." I think Amit Varma's quote, "the more data points you have of the world, the more high-def your picture is", is also pertinent here.

Anyway, I don't really know what's the point of all this exertion but that abandoned post was bothering me so I came here to take it to some conclusion and get rid of it from my head. I suppose that's not an innoble purpose of writing- not to use it as an avenue to think through or even to reflect on this at a later point in time, but simply to not have to think about a certain thing now. Make room and move on.

5Having the same preoccupations since late teens used to seem endearing, now its just annoying and exasperating.

6My new plaything/ habit I'm trying to inculcate thanks to glowing reviews from two of my idols- Amit Varma and Venkatesh Rao.

7But what’s interesting about Herzog’s book is not so much what he might be refusing to think about as his refusal of a particular way of thinking. -From Mark O'Connell's review of Werner Herzog's Every Man for Himself and God Against All (which in a Freudian slip, I first wrote as All Against God).

Friday, December 1, 2023

far-right masculinity

I'm supremely happy to report Sandeep Reddy Vanga has shot himself in the foot crotch with Animal. It is a staggeringly poor film and the one line review of the film has to be what Dheeraj said yesterday, "Hope Vanga will not vangabettudu." Well, mate, he's done exactly that. For starters, I went in assuming that it was going to be problematic. But I kept telling Sravani, who was convinced that it was going to be a complete shit, that for all its faults Arjun Reddy was a very well-made film and that Animal was going to be the same too. I absolutely had no clue that the filmmaking would be as sub-par as this. Where do I start? 

Okay, broadly, there are three major problems: the story, the sex and the violence, and, ofcourse, the misogyny. 

The story is ostensibly of a son who loves his father so much that he's willing to burn the world for his attention and love, and does indeed kill and maul many in the film in a quest to protect and avenge. Which isn't a bad story to explore but there is so little focus or justification on that aspect that for long durations I couldn't really understand why he was wrecking all this havoc. Or like the father himself puts it towards the end, "You are a criminal and use this love for me as an excuse for indulging in those tendencies"; I think a bunch of us in the theatre realised that hours before he did (and with a running time of about 3 hours 21 minutes, I mean hours). The tone is all over the place, veering madly from scene to scene, and I was hard-pressed to understand what emotional register I was supposed to access this on. Its actually a fairly common Telugu film practice, which I find more reflective of incompetence than inspiration (the full meals excuse), and with the large number of Telugu directors making films in Bollywood over the past few years, I think its catching up there too. Ofcourse, it is not necessary that all characters behave in a 'realistic' way in a film, even if it can be precisely defined, but isn't it important that the filmmaker communicate the emotional contours of the film initially and then play within those rules? For instance, even if you are the son of the richest man in the country, can you get away with firing a gun in a college or killing "hundreds" of people in your hotel with a custom-made machine gun? Not one character's actions or reactions seem plausible, even within that context, and they convey nothing about the human condition. All they do is exist as stick characters for Vanga to give his hero an excuse to go behave as selfishly and recklessly as possible, and get away with it.

Towards the beginning of the film, the hero tells the heroine that in an earlier time Alpha males ruled the world and all the womenfolk chose to procreate with them. That made the other men jealous and so they invented poetry. I laughed at the gambit because I felt that it was a provacative statement that would lead onto interesting arcs. But Vanga has nothing interesting to say either about the alphas or the others. His alpha is such a juvenile creation that he can't think of anything except sex, guns or, in a couple of instances, fucking pubes (I never thought I'd have to write that word on this blog, damn!). Take the most alpha obsessed male animals in the entire kingdom, and they'd cringe at the cartoon depictions of sex and violence if you showed them this film. Even those bloody rams would go, "Bro, please, we're more than this". For a second forget the misogyny, this is misandry. He has reduced all men to the occassional fantasies of a 13-year old boy- sex, guns, fast cars, conquest. I found it instructive that the word empire was thrown around a couple of times in the film. I think the portrayal of males in the film is based on medieval myth. This is how I think Vanga believes, say, Genghis Khan's army behaved. With this level of bloodlust, impunity, absence of any morality or thought subtler than the basest of our instincts. Not even medieval fact but myth, because I think even 700 years ago, being a powerful, successful ruler (alpha!) had to be more than being physically strong or rich. Even from a filmmaking perspective, while I suppose he intended the violence to be shocking, it came across more as irritating. I mean you can lift the axe-corridor fight scene from Oldboy but without the commensurate depth in writing, it never goes beyond being a cool, stylistic choice. This is a film that's constantly shouting without having anything interesting to say, that's provacative without being subversive. 

Finally, let's get to the misogyny. Having seen his responses to the flak against Kabir Singh, I expected Vanga to double down on his initial forays towards portrayal of women. I was reluctant to call them his convictions because I didn't know if he genuinely thinks that about women, but after watching this film I'm fairly convinced that even if he thinks that way its not probably a thought-through position. He feels that this kind of characterisation provokes people, gives his film the attention and him the reputation of being an enfant terrible, and he's happy with that arrangement. What Srikanth Srinivasan said so perceptively about Kantara is applicable here; To treat this film "as the expression of a comprehensive worldview is to mischaracterize the work". All women are treated like second-class citizens, sex is conquest and only a reflection of the man's prowess, the patriarchy is unrelenting, there's a pervasive sense of "bros before hoes" and, worst of all, the women embrace and celebrate their position. There were a couple of instances in the film when Bhajji turned to me and laughingly said, "You should've brought Sravani yaar, she'd have loved this scene." Well, she'd have probably flung a slipper at the screen and her action would've been justified. For all this bravado posturing, at some level I think Vanga was quite intimidated by the angry response from feminists to Kabir Singh, because in Animal it is the heroine who slaps the hero, and elevates her husband for being with her in the labour room and subsequently acting as her "nurse, mother, father, gynaecologist.." Having said that though, the heroine, not to mention the hero's sisters or the second heroine or the villain's wives, is treated with such disdain and lack of any importance to her agency that I couldn't help but be repulsed by everyone involved in the making of the film. Like Bhajji, again, so strikingly asked, "What would the director's wife have said after seeing this?"

That's about the film. Now, let's talk about its social ramifications. Instructively, when I wrote about Arjun Reddy 5 years ago, I was keen to get away with the social questions first and trip on the film itself. It is a tribute to all my discussions with Sravani that I'm now capable of looking away from the 'art as art' lens, and see films in a wider context. For all its failings as a film, judging by the responses in the housefull theatre I saw it in, the film will become a hit. The target demographic for this film is 15-30 year old men, and I think they'll be impressed and energised, if not inspired, by a few strong scenes. And as much as I'd like for it to be left at the exit, atleast a few guys will carry some of these thoughts out into the world to act on. While I'm more or less a free speech absolutist, on this point though I must concur with Sravani that this filth is not good for our society and probably shouldn't have been made. Not because it makes arguments that I don't agree with but because it doesn't make particularly interesting or useful arguments. Infact, it doesn't make any arguments except seek to shock and excite at a very shallow level. For all the progress Bollywood has made towards portraying more modern and metrosexual men since the turn of the millennium (thank god for the Farooq Sheikhs and the Amol Palekars, among others, before that), the turn towards an older, toxic form of masculinity is back with us, and it is shameful to see it is being promulgated by Telugu directors. Setting the moral lament aside, I wonder if it is simply an entertainment cyclical trend, with one existing as the mainstream and the other as a sub-stratum, or if it is part of the wider sociocultural milieu in which we extole the "56-inch chest", valorise the hyper-masculinity of the army, or proudly endorse a certain kind of Jat/ Rajput/ Reddy pride. 

Discussing these points with Amma a few minutes ago, I've come to the conclusion that there is no excuse for making this film- not the market, not this is what the audience wants, not artistic freedom, not if not us someone else will. Everyone involved is culpable, including myself which I hope to atone a bit by writing this post, and I really hope there is social pushback. All I can do is end by quoting Ebert, "I hated hated hated this movie".

Tuesday, November 28, 2023

that rite of passage

కిషోర్ అన్న and శారద గారు invited us to their house last evening because it was సోమవారం కార్తీక పౌర్ణమి and they were planning to do a రుద్రాభిషేకం. So we arrived there expecting to find many people, like it was when they did the సత్యనారాయణ వ్రతం, and were surprised to realise it was just us. Because he hadn't started the పూజ yet, అన్నtold me to change into a ధోతి ఉత్తరీయం and sit with him. While changing I realised I wasn't wearing my జంధ్యం and embarassedly informed him. He paused what he was doing and looked at me with barely concealed anger. He handed me a new one, muttering, "జంధ్యం లేకుండా ఏంటి ఆదిత్య", to which I replied, "Sorry" in a low voice, and he said, "నాకెందుకు sorry". Then we spent the next 15 minutes doing the ceremony so that I could wear it at the end of which he said, "I hope I'm not imposing" and I replied, "అయ్యో, లేదండి. దాన్ని ధిక్కరించే స్థాయికి చేరుకోలేదు", and then we started the అభిషేకం.

As I write this, I can see Sravani grimace, at the time of reading, at my easy capitulation. I understand her anger and disappointment. But at some level, what I said is true. In a different context, I would probably have argued and discussed the metaphysical aspects of the ritual itself and his belief. But there I felt more vulnerable because I was invited precisely for being born into a బ్రాహ్మణ household. And I felt like I was pretending to be one without backing it up with learning and experience. The problem was more in the lack of knowledge than in the pretense. Its the equivalent of being the only Indian amongst a group of people from other nationalities, and be stumped at answering the most basic question about India.

During the అభిషేకం itself, I felt inadequate and phony- not because of my lack of belief (not at all, actually, because I was processing it at the level of the ritual itself) nor because of the lack of conviction in my atheism, but because of my inability to learn about and embrace, not either but both, fully. If I had to be stupid, I wanted to be profoundly stupid, not simply stupid. I wanted to have known the శ్రీ  సూక్తం, పురుష సూక్తం, నమకం - చమకం, done the ritual properly, and then sat down to talk about it. తెలిసీ తెలియకుండా ప్రశ్నలు వేయడం ఒక వయసు దాక బాగుంటుంది, చాలా అవసరం కూడా , కానీ ఆ వయసు దాటేసిన తరువాత అది అజ్ఞానం, చేతకాని తనం, మరీ ముఖ్యంగా, నిజంగా తెలుసుకోవాలన్న జిజ్ఞాస కాక ఏదో వాగాలి కాబట్టి వాగే అలవాటు గానే మిగిలిపోతుంది. కుర్రాడికి మగవాడికి అదే తేడా.

While that's what happened last night, during the course of a recent, important conversation, I realised that one of the primary reasons why I feel like and act like a boy, permanently, seems to be because I never learnt how to grow into a man. To rephrase what I said then, "I was born a boy and didn't have to be taught how to behave like one. But to grow into a man, I had to see, learn, emulate, follow someone- which I couldn't. Its usually the father who acts as the template and because that was missing, I sort of never went through the rite of passage." Interestingly, I remember having a few very serious conversations on this topic with friends back in college but I don't think its come up since. I've been thinking over the past few days if that is an excuse but I think it is a genuine reason. Not that everyone with a father either learns or can learn from him, but in my case, and its hit me at the age of 33, that it has been a crisis; I know it is a big word and I'm used to downplaying my confusions and struggles as nothing more than products of immaturity or pigheadedness or affectation, but the last few months have been quite impactful in forcing me to look at these issues without escaping into abstraction or frivolity. 

Again, I don't mean to bring this up as an excuse for my actions or words through my adulthood. Infact, maybe some good has happened by not having that tree to grow in the shade of. Nonetheless, I think the time has come to look at this as objectively as I can- both without arrogance and, more dangerously, an escapist, reflexive kind of self-effacement. Stanley Kubrick once said that talking beautifully about a problem can give the mistaken impression that it has been solved. Similarly, talking openly about one's failings or confusions can give the impression, primarily to oneself, that nothing needs to be done to fix it. I seem to have fallen into that trap. Its like my reflexive sorry to anyone- there you go, I've admitted my mistake. Happy? What more do you want from me- to fix it?.

"Don't hedge your prose with little timidities", writes William Zinsser. In a sense, to be a man is to live upto that dictum. I can't keep kvetching and apologising and backtracking and airing my fucking uncertainities all my life. Or to quote Martin McDonagh from In Bruges, "He's suicidal? I'm suicidal, you're suicidal, everybody's fucking suicidal. We don't all keep going on about it. Has he killed himself yet? So he's not fucking suicidal, is he?". 

Yet there's a part of me that cherishes this openness, honesty, a refreshing lack of pretense. I don't want to lose that. I also don't want to extend my 'extended adoloscence' any further. Don't lose the play but don't trivialise the serious. That is the holy grail. I recently wrote to Sravani that I want to live in a way where I cherish the now, the ephemeral intense short-term without losing the ability to build the more permanent, grander long-term artefacts of life. To use Dr. Venki Ramakrishnan's dichotomy, we need both the interesting and the important. The boyish and the manly. I can see the churn happening inside me, intense and focused, in real-time. Has it happened before? I can't recollect. The bigger question, though, is, Will it lead to transformation?

Thankfully, one good thing is the immutable realisation that any transformation is a sum of innumerable daily actions, not an act of inspiration or blessing. I am trying to inculcate that into my daily life and ofcourse it is slow and hard, but as long as delusions don't cloud my eyes for long, I think I'll keep at it and get there. 

Who'd've thought that Tracy Austin was the genius after all.

Thursday, November 9, 2023

Democracy in an age of epistemic uncertainty

I wrote this as a Public Engagement submission for my Takshashila GCPP course. It was inspired by a Nitin Pai lecture and I'm somewhat proud of this essay.

--

Democracy in an age of epistemic uncertainty
or politics as usual?

Would mass democracy have been possible except during the high-noon of Modernism?

The notion that a group of citizens can, by voting for their favoured (okay, maybe that’s too strong: how about least-worst?) politicians, choose the best leader to lead the nation seems like a fairly recent one. One that seems to have sprung less from that being the best way than a method with the least need for constant justification. That old fox Churchill was onto something when he called it the worst form of government and all that.

There are two obvious upsides to this arrangement though:

1. Since the people are, ostensibly, (s)electing their rulers (and I use the term with caution in the context of really existing democracy), there is less risk of an internal sabotage or coup, and, consequently, better chances of order and social cohesion.

2. By collating preferences from citizens who are actually impacted by actions of the government, the policy-makers get a sense of what is important for citizenry and what they need to work upon. It is an information gathering mechanism, albeit imperfect and prone to mis/disreadings, but works better than a more authoritarian form of government, if not for anything else but, simply because people are convinced that this is what the majority seems to want and that needs to be respected. Elections are, critically, also an intra-communication mechanism for society to talk to itself.

The precondition for both these tenets is a fundamental trust in the ability and the stated-intentions of the elected politicians and, perhaps more importantly, that other voters are as rational and well-intentioned as one is. The trust in the political system in India seems to have started fraying post the intial heyday of independence with a suspicion of the inadequacies and corruption of the political class taking root. But there was a clear demarcation between the classes of politicians and citizens with the mainstream media acting as the broad platform. To be clear, while any society, especially Indian society, has been sliced into smaller groups across many dimensions of gender, caste, language, region, occupation etc., the notion of all being equal citizens seems to have been deeply ingrained- atleast as a sentiment. With the advent, and rapid penetration, of social media platforms, that sense of seemingly solid reality began cracking up.

Much has been written about how the liberal intelligentsia was rudely exposed to this truth with the twin shocks of Brexit and Trump but if anything that was more a culmination of the process of distintegration begun in the late 2000s than an instantaneous manifestation. Steve Bannon's diabolical genius, it seems to me, was not to find a way to lie to people convincingly or confuse them ('Flood the zone with shit') as much as a realisation that we don't always seek information in search of some pristine truth (even if it indeed is as transcendentally static as some of us like to believe). We do it for various social reasons including signalling, to feel part of a group, reach for it as a way of assuaging some other grievance, to fantasise etc. Like Tyler Cowen recently argued, misinformation isn't a supply-side problem as much as a demand-side one.

People who believe in QAnon conspiracies or the statement that India had internet connection during the Mahabharata or any of those, what might seem like, loony beliefs to a certain English-speaking, liberal, cosmopolitan (the anywheres, to use David Goodhart's useful dichotomy) individual, are not necessarily irrational or stupid or ill-intentioned (though probably that sub-section exists in this larger group) as responding to deeper insecurities or grudges. Pankaj Mishra's argument in Age of Anger that resentment caused by the gap between Neoliberal Capitalism’s extravagant promises and harsh realities thereby creating the ferment that has lead to radical tribalism, while overstretching, seems to me to contain a large truth. The tumult we live in right now is as much cognitive as social, political or economic. The world is becoming stranger and stranger, and some of us who are feeling more unmarooned than others are holding onto whatever we can for temporary succor.

This brings me to the original question of the link between Modernism and a wider optimism with respect to mass democracy. Presumably, and this is a very timid hypothesis because there is a lot of reading I need to do on this subject, during the reign of High Modernist thought, there was a deeply felt sense that the world could be tamed by better instruments of social science, that all of us were rational in a fundamentally similar way, progress was linear, and more information led to better knowledge led to better outcomes for all. That sentiment eroded first slowly and then all at once. But rather than being a failure, I'd like to think of this as reality refusing to conform to any set of theories for long. It is a natural product of evolution, what the philosopher Venkatesh Rao has called Oozification. As long as individual agents are free, intelligent, adaptive, complex, like we insist all of us are (which is one of the fundamental tenets of democracy itself), they will shape the world in ways unforseen. It is ludicrous to insist that all of us should be left to be who we want to be, as the progressives claim, and should be left to make and spend money as we see fit, as the neoliberals claims, and then also expect all to conform to certain Englightenment notions of universalism. Ofcourse, we'd all love to have a royal middle path with the best of both worlds but that's easier said than done. As the brilliant Don Watson recently wrote, “The voters, and all their ignorance and prejudices, their self-interest, their meanness, their gullibility, and all their goodwill, faith and conscientiousness, are the raw material of the democracy, and to blame them is like blaming the rain for falling”.

I think Hegel was onto something when he said there is a natural direction to history. It seems unlikely that a people used to freedom would willingly relinquish it. Interestingly, though, we seem to be doing exactly that with the rise of authoritarianism. Maybe for all its rhetorical value, there is only so much freedom a society and an individual can handle before the centrifugal forces take over and undermine the identity and stability of the entity. In a spectrum stretching from a rigidly fixed identity (say a caste identity that imposes extreme social and economic limitations) to an anything-you-want-to-do-no-restrictions type freedom (say a late capitalist society where nothing is solid and everything is infinitely malleable), I think individuals feel unconfortable at either extreme. And while they want their freedoms, they also want assurances. So, for instance, whatever we gain in economic and social freedoms, we seem to feel compelled give up in political and cultural freedoms. What is to change and what is to remain is the metaphysical responsibility of politics.

All this is a long-winded way of saying that while it may seem like all of this will crash and burn, I think we will be able to create new tools, learn more about ourselves and the world, and fix all this mid-flight. Not a permanent fix but enough to keep flying until it becomes someone else’s problem.

artrippin'

కీడా కోలా అనే ఈ తరుణ్ భాస్కర్ అద్వైత ప్రవచనానికి క్వింటిన్ టారెంటినో వేదిక సిద్ధం చేయగా గయ్ రిట్చీ మైకు సౌండూ బాధ్యతలు నిర్వర్తించారు.

కార్ల పోతున్నప్పుడు నాకు శ్రావణికి అయ్యే మోస్ట్ రిపిటిటివ్ వాదన వివేక్ సాగర ఒవర్రేటెడా కాదా అన్నది. నేనంట అసల్ గసుంటి సౌండ్ ఇంకేడన్నా ఇన్నవా అని, తనంటది అదే ప్రాబ్లం అన్ని పాటల్ ఒకటే తీరుంటయని. నాక్ రెఫ్యూట్ చేయనీకె కరెక్ట్ వాదన దొరక్క తంటాలు పడతాంటా. నేన్ సిగ్నేచర్ అంట, తను రిపిటెటివ్ అంటది. మొన్న డిపిరి డిపిరి తనకి ఇనబెడ్తాన్నప్పుడు అంటే సుందరానికి ప్రోమో సాంగ్ లెక్కనే ఉన్నది కదా అన్నది. నాక్ కాలి అది నెక్స్ట్ ప్లే చేశి ఏంది సిమిలారిటీ అని అడిగిన. ఆ ఎక్సర్సైజ్ వల్ల ఇద్దరం చాలా శ్రద్దతో రెండు పాటలు వింటూంటె నాక్ ఒకటి తట్టింది- తన పాటలు ఆర్ ఎ కలెక్షన్ ఆఫ్ మైక్రో-ట్యూన్స్ అని. ఆ జారీనెస్, బార్డర్లైన్ ఇన్‌కోహెరెన్స్, అమాల్గమేషన్ ఆఫ్ వేరీడ్ సౌండ్ స్టైల్స్ అన్నీ కలిపితే అది వివేక్ సాగర్ సౌండ్.

గీ ముచ్చట నిన్న ధీరజ్‌గాన్తో శ్వాస మీద ధ్యాస మీద ట్రిప్ అయితున్నప్పుడు చెప్పిన. అపుడ్ వాడొక మస్త్ మాట చెప్పిండు- వివెక్ సాగర్ మ్యూజిక్ మాన్యుఫాక్చర్ చెస్తడన్నా అన్నడు. అరె కరెక్ట్ పదం పట్టిండ్రభై అనిపించింది. ఆ తర్వాత తనని, రెహ్మాన్‌ని, ఇళయరాజాని కంపేర్ అండ్ కాంట్రాస్ట్ చేసే ప్రయత్నం చేశ్నం. మేమిద్దరం మ్యూజిక్‌ల అల్టిమేట్ గవార్లం కాబట్టి మాకు కనిపించి, చేజిక్కే పరికరాల్ని కాన్సెప్ట్స్‌నే వెతుకున్నం. మైనర్ డైగ్రెషన్: స్మరణ్ వివేక్ ఆన్ స్టెరాయిడ్స్ అని చెప్పి కొత్త పోరడు సౌండ్ట్రాక్ ఇనమన్న. మీర్‌భీ ఇన్నుర్రి- కిరాక్ ఫకిన్ గుడ్ ఉంటది. బాక్ టు గవార్ మ్యూజిక్ అనాలిసిస్: ధీరజ్ గాడన్నడు రెహ్మాన్ అచ్చిన కొత్తల పబ్లిక్ అంటుండె గీనె సిన్థసైజర్ గవీ ఎక్కువ వాడ్తడు, రాజా మ్యూజిక్ లోని ఇన్‌స్ట్రుమెంటల్ వెరైటీ ఉండది అని. టెక్నికల్లీ సాఫిస్టికేటెడ్ బట్ విదౌట్ ది రిచ్‌నెస్ ఎండ్ క్రియేటివిటీ ఇన్ మ్యూజిక్ అని (అరేయ్ ధీరజ్ నేన్‌గిన నిన్ను మిస్కోట్ చేస్తాంటే కింద కామెంట్స్‌ల తెలియజెయ్). కానీ మా తరం వాళ్ళకి ఆస్ మచ్ ఆస్ వీ లవ్ రాజా సర్, రెహ్మాన్ ఈస్ ద గోల్డ్ స్టాండర్డ్. మేబీ ఇట్సె జెనరేషనల్ థింగ్ అనుకున్నం. కానీ ఆ తర్వాత అచ్చిన అమిత్ త్రివేది (అమ్మతోడు డేవ్.డి ఏమన్న సౌండ్ట్రాకా), వివేక్ సాగర్‌లు ఎంత నచ్చినా ఇంకా రెహ్మాన్ స్టేల్ ఆర్ నీష్ అయిపోలేదు. ఎందుకని జర ఆలోచన పెట్టినం.

అపుడ్ మెహెరన్న తట్టిండు. మా స్మాల్ కెపాసిటీస్‌ల నేను ధీరజ్‌గాడు ఈ కొత్త మ్యూజిక్ డైరెక్టర్స్ లెక్క. కొత్త టూల్స్ వాడుకుంట మాకు ఉన్న కేపబిలిటిల మేము మా యధార్థాన్ని పట్టునికి, ప్రతిబింబించే ఆర్ట్ (నా రాతలకి అది పెద్ద పదం కానీ ప్రస్తుతానికి అడ్జెస్ట్ కార్రి) క్రియేట్ చేస్తున్నం. ఆ ఫ్రాగ్మెంటేషన్, పీస్-మీల్ అప్రోచ్ అప్పుడప్పుడు వర్కౌట్ అయితది కానీ కన్సిస్టెన్సీ అంత లేదు. మోర్ ఇంపార్టెంట్లో, అది మాబోటొల్లకి నచ్చిద్ది కానీ వైడర్ ఆడియెన్స్, బోత్ ఇన్ టైం అండ్ స్పేస్, దొర్కరు. కానీ మెహెరన్న రచనలు అట్ల కాదు. దే ఆర్ నాట్ జస్ట్ స్టాగరింగ్లీ పర్టినెంట్ బట్ అల్సో పార్ట్ ఆఫ్ ది ట్రిడిషన్. అదెట్ల, ఎందుకు అని ఆలోచిస్తే మాకర్థమైనది ఏందటే ఆయన కానన్ చదివిండు, ఆకళింపు చేస్కున్నడు, మంచి చెడు గ్రహించి ఆ పరంపరని ఎంబ్రేజ్ చేశిండు. మేము అట్లేంలే. ఎంతోకొంత రాయొచ్చు కాబట్టి దిమాఖ్ మే జో ఆయా వో లిఖ్ దేరే. ఇప్పటి ప్రపంచంతో ఎంగేజ్ అయితున్నం కాబట్టి ఇంతో అంతో ఆ వైబ్, జైట్‌గైస్ట్ స్పృహ అందులో మిళితమైనా ఫన్‌డమెంటల్ ప్రిన్సిపల్స్ తెలీవు కాబట్టి అవి నిలవవు అని నా అభిప్రాయం. ధీరజ్ గాడికి అట్లాంటిదేదో సృష్టించాలన్న కాంక్ష ఉందనుకుంట గానీ నాక్ లేదు/ పోయింది. ట్రూత్ ఓవర్ బ్యూటీ అని నేననేదానికి మూల కారణం నాలో బ్యూటీని నిర్వచించి, సృష్టించ గలిగే సామర్థ్యం లేకపోవటం. ఎనీవే, మెహెరన్న రెహ్మాన్ లాగ ఎందుకంటే ఆయన క్రాఫ్ట్ ఈజ్ బిల్ట్ ఆన్ ఎ క్లాసికల్ ఎడ్యుకేషన్ బట్ హిజ్ ప్రీఆక్యుపేషన్స్ ఆర్ కాంటెంపొరరీ.

పెద్ద డిస్క్లైమర్: వివేక్ సాగర్‌ది కంప్యూటర్ మ్యూజిక్ అని మా రాతలతో పోల్చటనికి కారణం పైపైన్ మా సృజన కూడ అలాంటిందే అన్న పోలిక కనిపించడం. అంతే కానీ వివేక్‌కి సంగీత జ్ఞానం లేదన్న ప్రతిపాదన కాదు. అలా అనేంత స్థాయి మాకెలానో లేదు, అహంకారమూ లేదు. అంతేగాక తన సంగీతం పట్ల ఎంతో ఇష్టము, కృతజ్ఞత ఉన్నాయి. గీ ముచ్చటల నన్ ఆఫ్ అవర్ పర్సానిఫికేషన్స్ మేబీ ఆక్యురేట్. గిదంతా మా కల్పనే.

ఈ లొల్లి ఎపుడ్ ఉండనే ఉంటది కానీ మీర్ పొయ్యి కీడా కోల చూడుర్రి. ఇచ్చి పడేశిండు తరుణ్. ఇగ వివేక్ భాయ్ దాన్ని మెగా ఎలివేట్ చేశిండు. నాకైతే స్నాచ్ ఇన్స్పిరేషన్ మస్త్ కొట్టొచినట్టు ఔపడ్డది (రఘురామ్ బాటంస్-అప్, ఫ్లైట్ టేకాఫ్, స్క్రీమ్ క్విక్-కట్ ఈజ్ ఎ క్లియర్ హొమాజ్). ఎడ్గర్ రైట్ ప్రభావం ఉందని సద్విన కానీ నేన్ వాన్ సైన్మాల్ సూడలే కాబట్టి తెల్వది. టారెంటినో ఎలానో ఉంటడు. ఆయన వీళ్ళందరి పెద్దన్న- హీ ఈజ్ ద ఒరిజినల్ భక్త నాయుడు. తరుణ్/ జీవన్/ విష్ణు ట్రాక్ ఈజ్ గోల్డ్; విష్ణు ఓయ్ ఈజ్ అల్వేస్ ఎ థ్రిల్ టు వాచ్.

ఒకప్పుడు దీన్ని పోస్ట్-మాడ్రనని గిదని గదని అర్థం చేస్కొని నేన్ గిసుంటిది ఎట్ల క్రియేట్ చేయలని తంటాలు పడి పరేషాన్ అయితుండె. ఇపుడ్ భీ తెల్సుకోవలన్న జిజ్ఞాస, ఇగో గిట్ల ఒర్లే అలవాటు పోలే కానీ అరే నేన్ ఎందుక్ర భై చేయలేక పోతున్న అన్న ఒళ్ళుమంట, కచ్చ లెవ్వు. కొంత వరకు దానికి కారణం నేనూ ఇంతో అంతో రాసుకోడం/ ఫిల్మ్ చేయడం, నా లిమిటెడ్ కేపబిలిటీస్‌ని అక్సెప్ట్ చేయటమే కాక నచ్చిన ఆర్ట్‌ని ఇష్టంతో, కృతజ్ఞతతో, స్వేచ్ఛతో చెరిష్ చేసే పరిపక్వత రావటం. ఇలా బావుంది, ఆస్ యూష్వల్ ఎన్నాళ్ళుంటదో చూడాలి మరి.

Friday, November 3, 2023

the world forgetting by the world forgot

A few days ago I was having lunch with a friend in the office when a bird flew past us. A noisy miner. I don't know how it managed to get in through the revolving doors but it was hopelessly disoriented, confused and, possibly, panicking. It kept flying around and every couple of minutes would fly straight up, mistaking the glass for the sky, and bumping into it and falling back down. It was a wretched sight and we didn't know what to do. The security personnel either didn't mind it or didn't know how to get it out, so it was condemned to be stuck in there until it injured itself or lay down exhausted, and someone could pick it up and fling it out. Ofcourse, like any self-respecting bleeding-heart liberal my heart pined for it, for a few minutes until I went back to my desk- out of sight, out of mind. That incident happened when I was midway through Siddhartha Deb's The Beautiful and the Damned, and it seemed like the perfect metaphor for the lives he was writing about. 

In the film Piku, Deepika takes Irrfan saab around Kolkata on a sight-seeing trip imposing onto places her personal connection with them. At one point she finds a shopping mall where there was an old single-screen, to which were attached fond memories, and is surprised and disappointed with the change. To which his character replies, "लोग शायद इसीको डेवेलपमेंट कहते हैं |". It is a stunning line that conveys way more than it should. It could only be uttered by a bourgeoisie, someone who is capable of noticing even massive change only with respect to how it impacts his feelings. I identified with it so much. 

The people Deb writes about in this magnificent, invaluable book though are impacted so fundamentally and violently by what we would call modernity and development, that they feel lost and tormented for years if not decades. Their lives so quickly and brutally picked up and cast away into the vast maw of the capital-industrial machine (though the word machine feels impossibly meek to describe the vastness and hunger of this amorphous, but unbearably heavy, entity we call Industrial Modernity) that their sense of self, family, community, tradition and culture, everything that makes life meaningful, bearable, occasionally enjoyable, is shredded. This, this thing snatches away their humanity and treats them as nothing more than nuts and bolts required to keep this waves of 'progress' running. I have begun to understand the importance of economic growth (thanks in no small part to Amit Varma's The Seen and the Unseen) but it is not only ridiculous to lazily assume that this is a net good (even if it were what about all the bad?) but that this is the only bloody way to improving the human condition.

I have been fortunate enough, over the last few years, to read, and occasionally watch, incredible social portraits of the effects of modernity on Indian society

  • Butter Chicken in Ludhiana - Pankaj Mishra
  • Maximum City - Suketu Mehta
  • A Free Man - Aman Sethi
  • Capital - Rana Dasgupta
  • My Seditious Heart - Arundhati Roy
  • Shanghai - Dibakar Banerjee
  • Leaving Home - Jaideep Varma
  • Dreamers - Snigdha Poonam (to read)

and to that stellar list, I must add this book. Deb's incisive prose is sharp, strong, deep and poetic, and I had to pause after each of the 6 chapters because it was too much to bear. In contrast to almost all the other works I've cited above, except possibly Roy, it is direct in its indictment of the Indian elites for their greed and collusion in the incredible human suffering. It is easy to say I haven't felt as much shame and anger from reading a book in a long time but only my actions will tell if it really has had an impacted or if its just self-signalling. I'd like to believe that the feelings were real. Deb is a master prose stylist, I was underlining entire paragraphs, and marvelling at his ability to see through all the layers of distractions and get to the heart of the matter.

Briefly, the subjects are as follows:

  • Introduction: After painting a broad picture of the changes spreading across India in the mid-2000s- the rise of the Hindu far right, the glamour of the BPO jobs, the exploding urbanisation- he spends time with Abdul Jabbar, a man who runs an NGO in Bhopal for victims of the gas tragedy and tries to capture the reality of a large section of poor, marginalised Indians who have to fight not only with rich corporations, but also the state, for justice.
  • The Great Gatsby: I first read this essay in The Caravan many years ago and loved it. Arindham Chaudhuri, at that point in time, was huge and while I always had the suspicion that he was a fraud, Deb's incredible essay not only painted the socioeconomic milieu in which he was operating and gaining such success, but also used his story to convey the cultural shift in the country with regards to notions of success, wealth and an individual's dharma, subsequently even calling out people like myself for our snobbery and condescension.
  • Ghosts in the Machine: In which he tries to understand the transformation of Bangalore into the Silicon Valley of India by following a couple of software employees. The return from US but a desire to build a mini-US there, the unmoored-ness waiting to be compensated by New Spirituality, the desire to see Software Engineering as Brahminical in its pristineness and abstraction ignoring the messy materiality in which IT operates, the desire to use technology for greater good that is quickly undermined by corporate and political vested interests. He also understands fairly quickly that the growth story in India wasn't as much about software efficiency as it was about real estate, financialisation, crony capitalism, and broken promises of politicians.
  • Red Sorghum: In which he contrasts the increasing richness of Hyderabad with the poverty of surrounding Telangana districts- the farmer suicides, the destruction of older, rural lifestyles, the inequality in development creating a schizophrenic sense of two different worlds less than a hundred kilometres apart. I found this particularly hard reading because I grew up in Hyderabad during this era, had atleast a passing knowledge of the political and economic changes, but no one around me seems to have acknowledged the fact that the rise of one and the fall of all others were interrelated.
  • The Factory: He spends time in a TMT factory interacting with workers, mostly migrants from the East and the Northeast, and tries to convey the harsh lives of these men. This was again a tough piece to get through because for once the manipulating factors weren't abstractions like information technology or neoliberal policies, but rather old-school oppression, uprootedness and dehumanising physical work.
  • The Girl from F&B: About the life of a particular Manipuri girl who works in the hospitality sector in New Delhi. Deb uses her story to talk about the hundreds of thousands of people from the Northeast who come to mainland India (his phrase) in search of better opportunities and how they're treated as different ("..in the pejorative language commonly used in Delhi for all Mongoloid people - a Chinky") and discriminated against.

I want to offer a taste by quoting a few lines:

  • And when the writer needs the stories of people's lives, those narratives that insert recognisable, human shapes into large but abstract conflicts, he or she depends on people who have a sense of their own trajectories and who are willing to impose form on the chaos of their experiences and memories. -On how a writer sets out searching for stories
  • But the glamour was irresistible when combined with his middlebrow characteristics. He was one of the audience, even if he represented the final stage in the evolution of the petite bourgeoisie.. distilling down for them that cocktail of spurious tradition and manufactured modernity. -Reg Arindham Chaudhuri's Leadership Seminars
  • ..invisible for the most part in the social landscape, they are considered safe people, productive at work, conservative in values and unlikely ever to raise difficult questions about race or inequality. -Reg NRIs considered the model minority
  • ..where Western men in khakis accompanied their Indian co-workers on a hesitant sampling of the food court version of native cuisine. -On gora corporate employees traveling to their Indian workspaces
  • He was alternatively opinionated and nervous, making random statements that seemed to have no point to them.. in a long rant that was perfectly articulate in flow if incoherent in thought. [Next to this line, I wrote, "OMG Aditya, be careful"] -About a young, frustrated man who spent a little too much time on rightwing message boards
  • The simplicity of the surroundings as well as the idealism it evoked seemed intensely familiar, until it brought to me, in a sudden, unbearable wave of nostalgia, my childhood and a time in India when many middle-class households had been like this, animated by literature, art and politics, and where people still lived in a community and believed in social justice. -During a meeting with an old Telugu Marxist in his middle-class, book-lined house late into the night as his granddaughter slept on his lap
  • ..leaving farmers to function in the best way they could in the free market with its syndicates, price volatility and speculation. -On the effects of the Naidu-McKinsey approach
  • When I put these different fragments together, I got not a whole but a bewildering, cubist image. -On trying to understanding the workings of a factory by interacting with people in various roles
  • It was utterly masculine in atmosphere.. the barracks were shorn of the softening aspects of the worst slum, from the liveliness of the children playing to women talking with each other. In a slum, there would have been colourful saris hung out to dry, the smell of cooking that was more than just functional.. -On the living quarters of the factory workers
  • Yet Delhi as an imperial capital was also a postmodern, millennial city where Esther traversed different layers of history everyday on her way to work. -The other side of the celebrated adage, "India lives in the 12th and the 21st century, and all the centuries in the middle, simultaneously"
  • In the West, with its long excess of capitalism, it might be possible to scoff at luxury brands. They had been around so long that they had lost some of their meaning. But in India, luxury brands still possessed power. -On reflecting on his own nervousness for entering a Paul Smith store in an upscale Delhi mall

At the end of one of Prof. Mehta's Justice lectures, I remember writing to myself that one of the primary duties of education is to de-invisibilise the invisible. In that sense, this is a supremely edifying and eye-opening read. Since moving to Australia 5 years ago, every Indian visit has opened my eyes to complexities, injustices and travails that people face there. However, reading this book has peeled further layers to show the ruthless, harsh conditions in which people live. It is one thing to imagine and theorise on the stunning power of Big Capital and Big State and Big Technology; Something else entirely to see the impact on millions of lives (the loss of older forms of knowledge, the lost cultural practices, broken social bonds, major psychological shifts) that these manifest. 

In an old The Seen and the Unseen episode, a guest tells Amit Varma that he doesn't feel like a citizen of a country, or a state, or even a city as much as the citizen of a particular village or a mohalla. I now understand better what he means. We are embodied beings, able to move only slowly and thoughtfully in the quarters of our actual geography, but we don't use the same caution when creating big theories and selling grand narratives based on them. Maybe those of us who wield that power (granted by money, social status, technical skill etc.) would do better by being more circumspect. This book will help that cause.

Thursday, November 2, 2023

moonstar meanderings

When once asked if how they played depended on their mood, setting, attire on stage etc. the inimitable Indian Ocean replied in the affirmitive, saying, "अगर नहा के गाओ तो अलग बजता हैं, बिना नहाके गाओ तो अलग बजता हैं |", before memorably adding, "और टट्टी के साथ गाओ तो बिलकुल अलग |". Holding onto that powerful dictum, I present to you material sublime:


Compared to making day night day night, this brewed for longer and I found it harder to grasp a narrative bassline that excited me. I started out by wanting to make it explicitly about Japan and then riffing on how it is almost impossible to understand an entire country and its complex history, before coming back to the inevitability of wanting and needing that compressed, imperfect model. But that task was both too daunting and less exciting because I had a rough idea of the complete picture and it was just about putting the pieces together. For a while I wanted to turn into a Zen-ish video but that too fell apart because I felt it was too easy to make a faux-Zen video that signalled depth without to backing it up with truth. 

A major phase transition happened thanks to Prof. Amit Chaudhuri's incredible Finding the Raga, and after spending weeks listening to new music for the film (from Japanese Jazz to Ryuichi Sakamoto and American Folk to Hamir Kalyani), I knew this was going to be Dhrupad too. That then freed me up from wanting to create a video essay, and let me go back to free associating and juxtaposing images, and instead of informing or convincing the viewer, to just prompt them into going off on their own on a slightly unusual (compared to their otherwise day-to-day concerns) path. The birds kind of came home in the last couple of weeks as I read Siddhartha Deb's astounding, brutal, magical The Beautiful and the Damned (which I hope to write about soon). I wanted to make this about the prosaic, the quitodian, the sensual, the anonymous, and I didn't really know if I found that exhilarating or limiting. Which was just as well because it was both, and having that ambiguity created enough epistemic and existential longing to get going. In the midst of this, at some point, my brain also said that I didn't have to make it the definitive Japan diary, and that freed me into pursuing and celebrating my present preoccupations and fascinations. I wanted to call it surfaces&essences to convey that gap between thinking we see and know and understand and truly seeing, knowing and understanding, but I didn't feel confident enough to make that claim not least because I wasn't sure if I was seeing things as they were or was being fooled by a deeper, more problemlatic part of my own mind that was claiming understanding without actually doing it. My eureka moment came in the shower one day when the quasi-poem i am things came to me unbidden, and I knew that the real world and its marvels excited me the most, and that was, for the most part, a genuine feeling. And all this was a way of trying to capture and convey that feeling.

So, yeah, I enjoyed making but have been very reluctant to share it widely. It is a strange, potent mix of arrogance ("I don't make it for others, I don't want to be corrupted by others' often shallow feedback"), self-loathing ("I have nothing original to say and I don't want to waste others' time by my shallow signalling"), shame ("The video clips are crap and I'm a fraud for trying to gain some validation by riding on the soaring wings of majestic artists, primarily Dagar Brothers"), and fear of rejection/ mockery ("What if I ask them to watch it, and they think its juvenile and see through its pretensions"). The few people I've sent it to have come back with comments sweet and kind as well as meh, so I know they're not all lying. 

One last thing: usually when I'm done making something, and wrestle with myself between making it more known and just letting it be out there ("గింజకి జీవశక్తి ఉంటే అది ఎక్కడ పడేసినా పోదు" and all that), I arrive, sooner or later, at the question of why is it even out there? Why don't I just save it on my computer and never tell anyone about it? Because its not really validation or attention or fame (however small it maybe) or social change is what I'm seeking. Ofcourse they all do exist but none of them are fundamental. The answer came to me in a conversation with Bhajji after I sent him the link and I was rather pleased for finally seeming to have arrived at a satisfactory, definite conclusion: 

It is that everything I write, film, say, quote, rant about and all that is to find friends, people who share my wavelength. With whom I can sit down on in a cafe on a late afternoon and get lost in expansive, spiralling conversations as the evening thickens around us. That, I find, is not a bad reason to put your rawest, most honest but also the best self out.

Thursday, October 19, 2023

playing it by the ear

A few days ago Sravani and I were at Nancy-Ankur's place and I was playing with Anaya. The little game we'd improvised was that I'd carry her half a foot above the ground and she'd try to pick her toys from the floor using her feet. Obviously it was tough but everytime the toy slipped from her grip, she only laughed harder until suddenly, in a split second, she slipped from my hands and fell on her head with a thud. We look at each other, both too shocked, for what seemed like a long moment before she started to cry. I picked her up and started apologising profusely which only seemed to make her cry harder. The adults around were nonchalant and when Ankur picked her up, I just sat there, crestfallen, unable to lift my head. They kept pacifying me, laughing it off and saying, "बच्चे तो गिरते रहते ही हैं, don't worry about it" but the look on Anaya's face refused to go away from my sight. Her expression seemed to say, "I trusted you and you let this happen". I felt so ashamed for having betrayed not just her trust but also the trust of her parents and नानी and मसि, that I broke down and refused to look up until Ankur insisted that we go out for a drive during which he proceeded to tell me how many times he had dropped her or caused a little injury inadvertently. I felt better but the shame refused to completely go away, so much so that even right now I feel a little tremor in my heart when I think of that incident. The pain that I caused her makes me feel bad ofcourse but what seemed to affect me more was my own failing: here was a child who trusted me and I couldn't live upto it. Viewing from the old Guilt-Shame classification, I didn't feel guilt for that particular action (neither did I do it wilfully nor was I particularly negligent and most importantly, and thankfully, it was only a minor accident) but shame (during those minutes, the entirety of my being felt inadequate- 33 years on Earth and I couldn't do one thing right. I felt undeserving of any good feeling).

I've had discussions around fatherhood with quite a few people and hands down Ankur has been the most brutally honest and articulate about his journey. So, again, after the incident we spoke about fatherhood, my vague fears, about fathers we saw around, and his intense feelings for her. When he spoke about thinking about her or missing her when he was at work, I thought I saw the poetic romance of a 12-year old boy floating in the clouds when thinking about his crush. Not just the joy, the longing, the singular presence of that girl in his life, but also a pleasant surprise at his own transformation of being able to love someone like that. It was incredibly sweet. Towards the end he told me, "यार टाइम लगता हैं इन सब चीज़ों में| मेरेको टाइम लगा सीखने में के क्या चीज़े करनी हैं, कैसे करनी हैं, मैं किस किसम का बाप हूँ| देख, फर इंस्टेंस, मैं उसको कुछ बोल नहीं सकता, मेरेको उसे ये सिखाना हैं वह सिखाना हैं करके कोई ख्वाइश हैं नहीं. मुझे सिर्फ वह खुश चाहिए, मैं उस के लिए प्लेमेट हु| मैं ये चाहता हूँ के वह मेरे पास आके कुछ भी बोले, के पापा हैं तोह चिल हैं|". 

This dovetailed with something instructive Sravani told me a couple of weeks ago, when I was, as usual, hemming and hawing about not wanting to be a 'typical' father, "You don't have to be a certain type of father. You do realise that you choose what is important for you, what you want to inculcate in the kid. If you think I wanna travel with my kid, then that's what you'll do. It doesn't only have to be buying property or taking them to tuitions or disciplining them or whatever else you think a 'typical' father does"1. That sort of helped me see that one of my biggest fears has been that I may to have change myself into a certain idea of a father, and both the standard refusal to conform as well as guilt that I may not be able to and fail the kid, created a demon within. It does now, finally, seem like there are as many kinds of fathers (the variations might be minor but they do exist) as there are kids.

Even during our walk yesterday, when TK was saying that he hasn't been able to buy something for himself because his keeps using that set money to buy something for his son, and I asked him if it pissed him off sometimes, he said, "नहीं, मतलब जब तक तुमने ये बात पूछी नहीं मुझे लगा ही नहीं के मैं कुछ सैक्रिफाइस कर रहा हूँ| बस हो जाता हैं|"

Finally, towards the end of another conversation, after I raved on about the complexity of being a human being, the myriad experiences, emotions, biases, weaknesses, desires we harbour etc. in our long lives (when I compare the difference between the lifetime of a feeling/ thought and the length of my own life, it does seem like a long life), it struck me that to want to isolate 'pure' intentions and 'genuine' feelings to ensure we really want it before embarking on a journey is a fool's errand. It is the full-blooded entirety of my being, all my history and biology and philosophy and poetry and narratives, that I call myself at this point of time that feels and does something. Ofcourse that could, and probably will, change about every single decision I've taken, and there's nothing I can do about it except adapt and improvise. Its not escapism for my actions in the sense of "please don't hold me responsible for what a different me did 5 years ago" as much as an acceptance of the complexity of my being- all murky thoughts and messy feelings. 

Dheeraj recently told me of an aphorism Ramarao Kanneganti garu apparently uttered, "We are not rational people. We are rationalising people". I find it to contain a deep truth. All this kvetching and manoeuvring and soaring I do on the blog is at some level a joke. For all the claims of realisations and epiphanies, I don't think I've been able to consciously apply these learnings. It exists primarily as a document of my wrangling with trying to understand and rationalise my behaviour. Everything here is both true and false. It is the truth but not the whole truth, whatever that is.

1Reminds me of the beautiful line from ఆకాశమంత- "ఒక బిడ్డ పుట్టినప్పుడే ఆ తండ్రి కూడా పుడతాడు"

Friday, September 29, 2023

well, sorta kinda

I ran my first marathon on Sunday, 17-Sep-2023. It took me 5 hours and 38 minutes. I was supposed to write this post the next day and had been excited about logging events of the amazing week leading upto it. But a certain listlessness came over me on Monday and I ended up spending the day watching Maa Vinta Gaadha Vinuma, and getting fairly irritated with the few people who were congratulating me for finishing the race. Broadly there were two reasons for the whining: 1. I felt like I didn't really earn the medal because I was constantly drinking electrolyte and eating energy bars throughout the run. It felt like I cheated my way through, of signalling fitness without actually being fit. 2. The congratulations had an air of social mores akin to wishing someone Happy Birthday or congratulating someone on their pregnancy. It just felt, no not fake but, shallow. There was no deep engagement or understanding except it being a slightly unusual entrant in polite, social small talk. Ofcourse, people for the most part don't give a hoot about what others do (I don't, so I assume everyone doesn't as well) and while I understand society works on the basis of these weak ties, maybe its my problem to not take it for what it is and compartmentalise well. Sravani, though, identified the problem brilliantly later the same day: "You can't be happy for long. You feel compelled to puncture it". I think she is spot on but let's leave that armchair exploration for a later blog post. To wind up that thread, since that day I've fallen sick, been stressed at work, vowed and failed, and didn't do anything much useful or fun. I feel surefooted now on more solid ground.

On 09-Sep, after two good GCPP lectures in one of which I got a laugh from the lecturer for characterising the Indian Constitution as "a philosophical treatise that makes some metaphysical assumptions", we went to Karunesh Talwar's special Adrak Ka Swaad in UNSW. That was good fun. The next day, Sravani and I visited a White Australian's house for the first time, a co-greenie, and ended up having a very good time. On Monday, it was another good discussion at the Socialist Alternative Reading Group though I'm getting tired of how everyone is already fairly convinced of socialism, so there are no arguments strong enough for people to question their priors. On Tuesday, I had a good conversation with a Dr. Haroon, also a co-greenie, who is trying to create a diverse group of people from the sub-continent to push back against the increasing Hindutva thought down here in Australia. On Wednesday morning, I handed out YES leaflets at the Westmead Station1. It was a lovely2 experience, and I chatted with this old lady I was paired with who is also an artist/ art instructor.  Later in the night I met Kruthi after 12 years and it was like entering a time portal. I hadn't realised how much I'd journeyed (too little objectively though), and all that that's happened over the interim period. On Thursday, I went to my first rally4 in Australia and that was a very illuminative experience. I couldn't find the group I was supposed to be with but nonetheless stuck up a couple of conversations, one very long with a Socialist Alternative member who recognised me from the reading groups, and we ranted and bitched about corrupt politicians and corporate types who weren't doing anything to halt global warming. On Friday, I rewatched Krishna and His Leela, and loved it more than I did the first time. Other than being fun and entertaining, I think it also raises important questions. To extend from Herzog5, we need 21st century stories for 21st century questions and complexities. And maybe part of the reason so much pop culture is obsessed with nostalgia is because it isn't able to create/ crack the new paradigm. On Saturday, Sravani and I had a long, hard argument which was only diffused by me having to run on Sunday. And Sunday was, for the lack of a better word, fun (bloody hell, I need a thesauraus). I had been fairly confident of doing the distance and after the first 10k I knew that as long as I didn't hurt myself or dehydrate and cramp, I'd finish the race. Kilometres circa 28-37 were the toughest due to the heat, the field of runners around me, and the slowness with which time passed but my playlist and my watch really helped. I'm glad I completed it, hopefully faster and purer next time.

Its funny how all this seemed so incredible as I was running and imagining writing this post on Sunday, but now just feels.. yeah, that wasn't too bad. I must've also read/ listened to some interesting stuff over the period but nothing stands out now, except maybe Prof. Amit Chaudhuri's philosophical-self-questioning-inducing6 Finding the Raga. 

It was a good week.

P.S: In other news, I've just started working on the Japan film primarily because Sravani said a while ago that she's really excited to see it. The ears of the old boyfriend inside perked up. Stay tuned.

1Infact, being vocal about YES has led me to a couple of intense arguments, primarily with Ankur and Prasad Babai, and while the conversations were thought-provoking, I couldn't find a way to persuade the other party because our primary assumptions about the nature of the world were quite different. I understood Ankur's POV but while he was letting fear of things taking an ugly turn stop him, I was more idealistic (and maybe naive in his eyes or, worse, a virtue-signalling liberal) and in need of a more redemptive arc for The Story of Australia. 

2I wanted to write enriching but thankfully realised it sounds too much like PR bullshit3. I think this is why language evolves: people find a nice way of communicating a deep, personal, human experience and soon enough the advertisers and PR fuckers take it over and corrupt it, forcing us to find new, purer ways to express.

3“An ad that pretends to be art is -- at absolute best -- like somebody who smiles warmly at you only because he wants something from you. This is dishonest, but what's sinister is the cumulative effect that such dishonesty has on us: since it offers a perfect facsimile or simulacrum of goodwill without goodwill's real spirit, it messes with our heads and eventually starts upping our defenses even in cases of genuine smiles and real art and true goodwill. It makes us feel confused and lonely and impotent and angry and scared. It causes despair.” -David Foster Wallace

4I also ended up being featured in the photo on The Guardian. In case you're wondering, I'm the genius holding the corflute upside down.

5"Give us adequate images. We, we lack adequate images, our civilization doesn't have adequate images. And I think our civilization is doomed, is gonna die out like dinosaurs if it does not develop an adequate language or adequate images." -Werner Herzog

6I initially wrote gobsmacking here but that's not what I felt except in a couple of occasions. Writing is so hard- to distil all the myriad and dynamic thoughts and emotions floating around in my head in the hours I spent with the book into one or two adjectives without exagerrating or doing disservice to my original feelings is so challenging. Not to mention finding a way to evade the catchy-line traps I must've setup in my head while reading and simultaenously anticipating this-ish post.