tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-52085595205945631112024-03-19T19:00:23.144+05:30free running lifeI'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy..sirish adityahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02692112394097540205noreply@blogger.comBlogger412125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5208559520594563111.post-34141851887621506522024-03-19T18:06:00.004+05:302024-03-19T18:59:52.080+05:30azad<p>"Anything that doesn't kill you only makes you stranger", says The Joker in The Dark Knight. The quote, obviously a riff on Nietzche's more famous <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_does_not_kill_me_makes_me_stronger" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"><i>stronger</i></a> line, was apparently misheard by Nolan but he felt it fitted The Joker's character better so left it at that. I think the Freudian slip not only turned the line more vivid but more instructive too. We do turn more estranged from the world the longer we live, it is just an inevitable byproduct of becoming an ever-larger bundle of contingencies, of carrying memories and habits of a past that gets further and further from the present. </p><p>When I wake up in the middle of the night, especially if I've been dreaming, and suddenly feel harked back to reality as I stand in the middle of the hall trying to switch the light on, disoriented, refusing to let go off the slipping dream-reality, there comes a moment when I feel more here than there, feel the rigid materiality of my real-reality refusing to budge, insisting on my presence, and I finally let go off the images swirling in my head and as I wait for the-here-and-the-now to load itself into a higher resolution, my mind sends a little gif to my internal monitor where I can see myself standing in the hall, bathed in the flourescent white light, completely alone. Its a brief moment that gives me a little shudder and it is almost inevitably followed by an little scene I associate with intense loneliness- That of David Foster Wallace's body hanging in his garage, his dogs circling at his feet, waiting for his partner to walk in and see him like that. </p><p>I have other images associated with people I know feeling lonely (somehow they're always sitting or standing in the middle of the hall post-midnight, bearing all the intense burden of all their life choices that led them to standing there and then; alone) but somehow DFW's suicide epitomises the feeling like nothing else. Perhaps because unlike others Wallace decided he couldn't go on anymore, felt so incapable of connecting with another human that checking out felt like the better option. It was not just the presence of despair but the absence of any hope. </p><p>I recently read somewhere that constant self-reflection and self-pop-psychoanalysis aren't very effective, even detrimental, to our well-being because you can spend a long time picking and choosing, shaping and turning the finite, albeit numerous, incidents and feelings of your life without gaining any deeper insights into <i>your </i>human condition. If a kaliedoscope with its few parts and simple arrangements can keep us so enamoured and occupied for such a long time, I can imagine the effect of tripping (and I use that word pointedly) on your memories and grievances considering you're the protagonist there- alarmingly addictive.</p><p>For the longest time I judged people who in instances when overcome by emotion refused to indulge in it and sought distraction. Feelings like melancholy, ennui, existential angst. Speficially because I've always derived an intense masturbatory pleasure in wallowing in those feelings. Now I understand better. While part of it is motivated by the fear of confronting and questioning your comforting assumptions, and another part by the view that people who do go on about it are simply seeking attention (connection, if I were to be charitable), there seems to be the realisation/ belief that retreating from the world, ofcourse with all its cheap thrills (I'm loathe to use the word fake here and I can't really explain to myself why), is futile and self-defeating. It will only make us feel lonelier, bitterer, more confused, more untethered. </p><p>The answers, even assuming there are any such ultimate ones, may not be found inside. What we see on the inside, the bundle of images and micro-narratives that we cherish and celebrate and hold dear as our personality, inalienable and alienating, is sometimes better be seen as a series of random events that only seem to hold patterns because we've been privy only to them. What binds them together has got less to do with whatever is immanent to them and more to do with the fact that they are the entire universe (oh how flippantly I use that rich, powerful word) of sensations we've collected, and so we can do nothing better than make convenient narratives out of them. </p><p>What we seem to crave, even in moments of ecstatic individuation, is a connection. Maybe not always with other people but with <i>something else </i>that will still turn our gaze away from the inside. After all isn't one way to annihilate the ego also to become so porous that it is hard to distinguish the inside from the outside. There is still a choice to be made though: do I become one with the mob or one with humanity? </p><p>There is nothing on the other side of that feeling of loneliness; We have to come back to people. <br /></p><p>With special thanks to, among many others, to Venkat Rao's jaw-droppingly, envy-inducingly brilliant writings over the years, Prof. Subbarao Kambhampati's <a href="https://open.spotify.com/episode/0IMNmWgjnLfAMSD38aEmYG" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">interview</a> on The Gradient, and Prof. Sean Carroll's <a href="https://open.spotify.com/episode/0UtzawUCKMrseH9b1QkukL" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">interview</a> with Prof. William Egginton's on The Rigor of Angels.<br /></p>sirish adityahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02692112394097540205noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5208559520594563111.post-5523394463446083972024-02-21T08:40:00.001+05:302024-02-22T15:19:06.311+05:30..that we sometimes choose not to<p>Meaning-making is an artisinal activity.</p><p>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 <i>naice</i> 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.</p><p>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 <i>zameen aasmaan ka faraq</i>. 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 <i>vasanas</i>)- 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. <br /></p><p>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<span>, 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. </span></p><p><span>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.</span></p><p><span>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 raw<i>er</i>, <i>un</i>processed, <i>as-yet-un</i>commodified, then the onus is on me to leave the comfortable contours of the socially acceptable and celebrated (atleast my social-circle<i>ly </i>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?)</span> but that is the nature of that journey. </p><p>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, <i>preblown</i>. </p><p>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. <br /></p>sirish adityahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02692112394097540205noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5208559520594563111.post-67523264503204582832024-01-27T19:09:00.002+05:302024-01-28T02:55:50.389+05:30fomo mofo<p>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 <a href="https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2021/07/29/mediocratopia-10/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">defined</a> 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. </p><p>The ostensible reason for getting on this train of thought is the <a href="https://uofsa.edu/gtl/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">MA</a> course being offered by University of Silicon Andhra (that name is such a <a href="https://gultrage.in/post/156143559398/i-am-a-dreamer-and-i-am-not-the-only-one" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Gult</a> fantasy boy!) that is being taught, among others, by <a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSPuDpldWomuwcl1UzEwomAxmQRJWCfIu" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Dr. Mrunalini garu</a> 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 <a href="https://chat.openai.com/share/ca86c4f9-62bf-404a-b8a2-9700db47fb23" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">lack of greed</a>. 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? </p><p>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 <i>extract </i>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 <a href="https://complexity.simplecast.com/episodes/99/transcript" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">conversation</a> 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 <a href="https://seenunseen.in/episodes/2023/5/16/episode-329-murali-neelakantan-looks-at-the-world/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">episode</a>), 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 <a href="https://lexfridman.com/lee-cronin-3-transcript" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">this</a> Lex Fridman conversation with Lee Cronin). In a sense, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_ignorance" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">rationality</a>, 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?</p><p>In <a href="https://studio.ribbonfarm.com/p/disturbed-realities" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">this</a> 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 <a href="https://venkatesh-rao.gitbook.io/summer-of-protocols/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">invisibilised</a> 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 <a href="https://studio.ribbonfarm.com/p/in-search-of-hardness" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">hard</a> boundaries, the failures, and their unborn children, a sense of longing and melancholy.</p><p>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 <a href="https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2023/12/21/shooting-werner-herzog-every-man-for-himself-and-god-against-all/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">this</a> essay to what Herzog has to say about Psychoanalysis.</p><p>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, <a href="https://youtu.be/Ssbo7Gytgcc" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Enjoy it</a>. అంతకు మించి ఏం పీకలేవ్ for the house always wins.</p><p>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 <a href="https://fs.blog/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">banal platitude</a>- Embrace the Moment.<br /></p>sirish adityahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02692112394097540205noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5208559520594563111.post-71157288029640492622024-01-12T18:34:00.000+05:302024-01-12T18:34:22.715+05:30సముద్రం<p>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.</p><p>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 him<sup>1</sup>. In that moment, I fell in love with Jaideep Ahlawat. </p><p>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. </p><p>Yet what I felt today was different. It is what I felt when I saw <a href="https://adiunplugged.blogspot.com/2018/09/how-do-you-like-pankaj-tripathi.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Pankaj Tripathi</a> 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 remembrance<sup>2</sup>. 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 it<sup>3</sup>? 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? </p><p>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.<br /></p><p><sup>1</sup> "Reason is revelation from within; Revelation is reason from without" -From the gorgeously sophisticated thinker Waleed Aly's People Like Us</p><p><sup>2</sup> Amit Varma and his exposition on the recursive nature of memory</p><p><sup>3</sup> You might know full well that Wasim's now going to bowl the reversing yorker but still be helpless to defend against it<br /></p>sirish adityahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02692112394097540205noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5208559520594563111.post-63563386434890221392024-01-11T13:26:00.001+05:302024-01-11T13:26:41.408+05:30a murmuration of starlings<p>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 <a href="https://seenunseen.in/episodes/2024/1/8/episode-363-ranjit-hoskote-is-dancing-in-chains/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">episode</a> 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.</p><p style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;">My name is virtue.</p><p style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;">Today I feel like Performance Art,</p><p style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;"><span> </span>basking on the boulevard.</p><p style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;">Sometimes I'm pretty,</p><p style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;"><span> </span>sometimes I'm grotesque,</p><p style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;"><span> </span><span> </span>always I'm fake.</p><p style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;">I ask the world,<span> </span> </p><p style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;"><span> </span>How can I be me?</p><p style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;">And the answer is</p><p style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;"><span> </span>Performance Art.</p><p style="text-align: left;">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 <i>essentially </i>ourself, uncontaminated by the external world, beyond mimetic desires, is only <i>that</i> us and everything else not just fake but dangerous and distracting? Is that what the spiritualists claim <i>atma </i>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. </p><p style="text-align: left;">Thankfully, around the same time as I was reading the book, the unfailingly brilliant Rob Horning wrote a <a href="https://robhorning.substack.com/p/normal-sounds" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">piece</a> 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. </p><p style="text-align: left;">"Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist." -John Maynard Keynes</p><p style="text-align: left;">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 real<i>er</i>, deep<i>er</i> self- Kahnemanian System 1 and 2 framework?</p><p style="text-align: left;">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 <a href="https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/philistinism-of-the-intellectual/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">essay</a> 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-</p><blockquote><p style="text-align: left;">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’. </p></blockquote><p>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 <a href="https://studio.ribbonfarm.com/p/a-camera-not-an-engine" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">unhumanness</a> and also something profoundly, proudly human. When we can, though, what glory and beauty, what grace.</p><p>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!<br /></p>sirish adityahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02692112394097540205noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5208559520594563111.post-38489072425620094722023-12-23T07:20:00.003+05:302023-12-23T07:20:58.975+05:30control, understand, adapt, repeat<p> 06/Dec/2023</p><p> Two guys are standing in a long line outside the American consulate. </p><p>"ఏ కాలేజ్?"<br />"ఒస్మానియా"<br />"నేను ఐఐటి బాంబే.. జీఆర్ఈ ఎంత?"<br />"1200"<br />"నాది 1500.. బాంక్ బ్యాలెన్స్ ఎంత చుపిస్తున్నావ్?"<br />"౩౦ లక్షలు"<br />"నేను రెండు కోట్లు"<br />"లైట్ తీస్కో" </p><p>Cut to them walking out. The IITian looks dejected as our hero taps him on the shoulder and asks, "వచ్చిందా?"</p><p>"లేదు స్కోర్ తక్కువని రిజెక్ట్ చేసారు. నీకు?"<br />"డౌ-ట?"<br />"అదేంటి, నీకన్నీ నాకంటే తక్కువ కదా?" </p><p>At which our hero briefly pauses before landing the punchline, "నీకు వీసా రాకపోతే ఏం చేయాలో తెలీదు నాకు తెలుసు. అది తేడా."<sup>1</sup></p><p>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. </p><p>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. </p><p>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 again<sup>2</sup>. And only age and experience<sup>3</sup>, the relentless cycle of trying, gaining, failing, retrying, that is finally convincing me that there won't be a eureka moment<sup>4</sup>. That it is everyday for itself.</p><p>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. <br /></p><p>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. <br /></p><p><sup>1</sup>From Deva Katta's Vennela. Its probably not verbatim but I didn't want to go back and check.</p><p><sup>2</sup>In an old <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y19StzTCLYI" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">talk</a>, 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.</p><p><sup>3</sup>Amma, I think you're right!</p><p><sup>4</sup>Prof. Alison Gopnik <a href="https://complexity.simplecast.com/episodes/99/transcript" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">says</a> 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.</p><p>--</p><p>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-adulty<sup>5</sup> but what can I do- I seem to need the constant reminders. Like I wrote in my Roam<sup>6</sup> 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.</p><p>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-reflection<sup>7</sup> 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.</p><p>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.<br /></p><p><sup>5</sup>Having the same preoccupations since late teens used to seem endearing, now its just annoying and exasperating.</p><p><sup>6</sup>My new plaything/ habit I'm trying to inculcate thanks to glowing reviews from two of my idols- Amit Varma and Venkatesh Rao.</p><p><sup>7</sup>But 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 <a href="https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2023/12/21/shooting-werner-herzog-every-man-for-himself-and-god-against-all/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">review</a> of Werner Herzog's Every Man for Himself and God Against All (which in a Freudian slip, I first wrote as All Against God).<br /></p>sirish adityahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02692112394097540205noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5208559520594563111.post-39209978697557495462023-12-01T20:02:00.005+05:302024-01-11T13:46:50.076+05:30far-right masculinity<p>I'm supremely happy to report Sandeep Reddy Vanga has shot himself in the <strike>foot</strike> 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 <i>vangabettudu</i>." 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? </p><p>Okay, broadly, there are three major problems: the story, the sex and the violence, and, ofcourse, the misogyny. </p><p>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.</p><p>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 <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/11/27/the-violence-of-the-rams" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">male animals</a> 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. </p><p>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 <a href="https://theseventhart.info/2022/11/18/kantara-2022/" target="_blank">Kantara</a> 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 <i>yaar, </i>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?"</p><p>That's about the film. Now, let's talk about its social ramifications. Instructively, when I wrote about <a href="https://adiunplugged.blogspot.com/2017/10/arjun-reddy-is-shiva-for-post.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Arjun Reddy</a> 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. </p><p>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".<br /></p>sirish adityahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02692112394097540205noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5208559520594563111.post-27791096572064333882023-11-28T09:12:00.001+05:302023-12-24T12:44:36.299+05:30that rite of passage<p>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.<br /></p><p>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.<br /></p><p>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. <br /></p><p>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. </p><p>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?.</p><p>"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?". </p><p>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 <i>the</i> <i>interesting</i> and <i>the</i> <i>important</i>. 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? </p><p>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. </p><p>Who'd've thought that <a href="https://gwern.net/doc/psychology/willpower/1994-wallace-howtracyaustinbrokemyheart.pdf" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Tracy Austin was the genius after all</a>.<br /></p>sirish adityahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02692112394097540205noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5208559520594563111.post-55761410357382095912023-11-09T09:23:00.000+05:302023-11-09T09:23:18.917+05:30Democracy in an age of epistemic uncertainty<p>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.</p><p>--<br /></p><b><u><a href="https://sirishaditya.substack.com/p/otherwise-known-as-democracy" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Democracy in an age of epistemic uncertainty</a></u></b> <br /><i>or politics as usual?</i><p>Would mass democracy have been possible except during the high-noon of Modernism?<br /><br />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.<br /><br />There are two obvious upsides to this arrangement though: <br /><br />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.<br /><br />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. <br /><br />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 <a href="https://seenunseen.in/episodes/2023/10/30/episode-353-apar-gupta-fights-the-good-fight/">corruption</a> of the political class taking root. But there was a clear demarcation between the classes of politicians and citizens with the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imagined_community">mainstream media</a> 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 <a href="https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/the-facts-do-not-matter/article21615781.ece">cracking up</a>. <br /><br />Much has been <a href="https://www.collectiveinkbooks.com/zer0-books/our-books/end-end-history">written</a> 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 <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/10/03/campaign-2024-will-ai-generated-misinformation-be-a-big-problem/ca0f56c0-61ea-11ee-b406-3ea724995806_story.html">argued</a>, misinformation isn't a supply-side problem as much as a demand-side one. <br /><br />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 <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/mar/22/the-road-to-somewhere-david-goodhart-populist-revolt-future-politics">useful dichotomy</a>) 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 <a href="https://literaryreview.co.uk/from-rationalism-to-ressentiment">resentment</a> 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 <a href="https://www.versobooks.com/products/2758-the-third-unconscious">cognitive</a> 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. <br /><br />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 <a href="https://studio.ribbonfarm.com/p/fear-of-oozification">Oozification</a>. 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 <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/pinkers-pollyannish-philosophy-and-its-perfidious-politics/">conform</a> 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 <a href="https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2023/november/don-watson/year-voice-broke">wrote</a>, “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”.<br /><br />I think Hegel was onto something when he said there is a natural direction to <a href="https://www.freedomlab.com/posts/hegel-and-the-unfolding-idea-of-freedom-in-the-21st-century">history</a>. 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. <br /><br />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.</p>sirish adityahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02692112394097540205noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5208559520594563111.post-11006009188500523362023-11-09T07:55:00.002+05:302023-11-10T07:58:38.122+05:30artrippin'కీడా కోలా అనే ఈ తరుణ్ భాస్కర్ అద్వైత ప్రవచనానికి క్వింటిన్ టారెంటినో వేదిక సిద్ధం చేయగా గయ్ రిట్చీ మైకు సౌండూ బాధ్యతలు నిర్వర్తించారు.<br /><br />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. <br /><br />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.<br /><br />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. <br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.sirish adityahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02692112394097540205noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5208559520594563111.post-45796337283630859902023-11-03T10:35:00.003+05:302023-11-04T14:35:58.418+05:30the world forgetting by the world forgot<p>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. </p><p>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. </p><p>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.</p><p>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</p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Butter Chicken in Ludhiana - Pankaj Mishra</li><li>Maximum City - Suketu Mehta</li><li>A Free Man - Aman Sethi</li><li>Capital - Rana Dasgupta</li><li>My Seditious Heart - Arundhati Roy</li><li>Shanghai - Dibakar Banerjee</li><li>Leaving Home - Jaideep Varma</li><li>Dreamers - Snigdha Poonam (to read) <br /></li></ul><p>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.</p><p>Briefly, the subjects are as follows:</p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>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.</li><li>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.</li><li>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.</li><li>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.</li><li>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.</li><li>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.<br /></li></ul><p>I want to offer a taste by quoting a few lines:</p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>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<br /></li><li>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</li><li>..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</li><li>..where Western men in khakis accompanied their Indian co-workers on a hesitant sampling of the food court version of native cuisine. -On <i>gora</i> corporate employees traveling to their Indian workspaces</li><li>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</li><li>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</li><li>..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</li><li>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</li><li>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</li><li>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"</li><li>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</li></ul><p>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. </p><p>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 <i>mohalla</i>. 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.<br /></p>sirish adityahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02692112394097540205noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5208559520594563111.post-40401793006606252732023-11-02T07:19:00.003+05:302023-11-14T03:33:23.318+05:30moonstar meanderings<p>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:</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ynmV2JyW0uQ" width="320" youtube-src-id="ynmV2JyW0uQ"></iframe></div><br /> Compared to making <a href="https://youtu.be/dPu7s4wNmNY" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">day night day night</a>,
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. <p></p><p>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.<br /></p><p>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. </p><p>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: </p><blockquote><p>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. <br /></p></blockquote>sirish adityahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02692112394097540205noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5208559520594563111.post-18526921750236920452023-10-19T04:38:00.001+05:302023-10-19T05:06:23.000+05:30playing it by the ear<p>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).</p><p>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|". </p><p>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"<sup>1</sup>. 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.</p><p>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|"</p><p>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. </p><p>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.<br /></p><p><sup>1</sup>Reminds me of the beautiful line from ఆకాశమంత- "ఒక బిడ్డ పుట్టినప్పుడే ఆ తండ్రి కూడా పుడతాడు"<br /></p>sirish adityahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02692112394097540205noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5208559520594563111.post-91464531926491972062023-09-29T07:27:00.004+05:302023-11-28T09:22:28.662+05:30well, sorta kinda<p>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.</p><p>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 Station<sup>1</sup>. It was a lovely<sup>2</sup> 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 rally<sup>4</sup> 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 Herzog<sup>5</sup>, 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.</p><p>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-inducing<sup>6</sup> Finding the Raga. </p><p>It was a good week.</p><p>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.<br /></p>
<p><sup>1</sup>Infact, 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. </p>
<p><sup>2</sup>I wanted to write enriching but thankfully realised it sounds too much like PR bullshit<sup>3</sup>. 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.</p>
<p><sup>3</sup>“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 <br /></p>
<p><sup>4</sup>I also ended up being featured in the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/sep/14/about-1000-protesters-rally-in-sydney-against-coal-seam-gas-and-water-buybacks" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">photo</a> on The Guardian. In case you're wondering, I'm the genius holding the corflute upside down.<br /></p>
<p><sup>5</sup>"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</p>
<p><sup>6</sup>I 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.<br /></p>sirish adityahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02692112394097540205noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5208559520594563111.post-60511442060837675632023-09-26T16:53:00.002+05:302023-09-26T16:53:22.349+05:30 Universal Basic Income: A way for a just society<p>This piece was published in the Basic Income Australia <a href="https://basicincomeaustralia.com/blog/?t=Universal-Basic-Income:-A-way-for-a-just-society" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">blogs section</a> last week.<br /><br />--<br /><br /> In his landmark book Justice: What is the right thing to do?, Prof. Michael Sandel presents three important aspects of a just society: that a just society Maximises Welfare, Respects Freedoms, and Promotes Virtue. Interestingly, they are also three progressive checkpoints on that journey. I want to explore the implications of UBI in pursuit of those ends. </p><p><b>UBI for Welfare</b> <br /><br /> As citizens of a civilised society, we are entitled to expect <a href="https://seenunseen.in/episodes/2018/1/8/episode-50-the-state-of-indian-politics/"> certain provisions </a> from the state - that there be a rule of law, that there be functioning public infrastructure, and that there be availability of basic education and healthcare. We think that every citizen of the country, irrespective of their circumstances or other forms of eligibility, should be able to access these services. But in a capitalist society, a certain amount of income is needed too to pay for basic necessities and that role is usually fulfilled by employment. While traditionally governments have relied on private enterprise to ensure maximum employability, when economies stagnate or there's a massive downturn of the business cycle, they have stepped in as '<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employer_of_last_resort">the employer of last resort</a>' (the famed Keynesian policies). Over decades that has transformed into a mechanism like JobSeeker (unemployment insurance or, colloquially, dole) which has been instituted to ensure people have enough money to get by. So in terms of welfare, the intentions here in Australia are present. <br /><br /> Now there are at least 3 issues with this mechanism: <br /><br /> 1. With this so-called 'Means Tested Eligibility', the government defines a set of conditions under which a person becomes eligible for payment. While this may seem like an understandable and acceptable policy, it is still a 20th century '<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State">Seeing like the State</a>' conception that may not be applicable to the dynamic, <a href="https://direct.mit.edu/daed/article/152/1/225/115009/The-Moral-Economy-of-High-Tech-Modernism"> hard-to-categorise realities </a> of the contemporary job market, especially with the AI revolution about to be tacked on. Additionally, a government in power can wilfully choose to exclude certain sections of the population to suit their own agenda. A recent example is the Coalition's decision to exclude <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-is-the-australian-government-letting-universities-suffer-138514"> university staff </a> from JobSeeker payment during the COVID crisis. <br /><br /> 2. This eligibility testing mechanism needs to ensure that 'bad players' are not gaming the system, so it needs a large organisational and technical structure to police and punish those getting benefits unfairly. Notwithstanding the bloat in the government and the expenditure of public money required to do so, we saw an example of the human suffering unleashed by faulty, inefficient and morally compromised actions the state is capable of with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robodebt_scheme"> Robodebt </a>. <br /><br /> 3. This type of eligibility testing also gives a certain section of society the ammunition to malign those seeking benefit as freeloaders or somehow morally compromised or even deserving of their predicament (the former Prime Minister's <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jul/23/the-welfare-myth-of-lifters-and-leaners-must-be-put-behind-us-so-robodebt-is-never-repeated"> Lifters and Leaners </a> dichotomy comes to mind). While it can be accorded that a certain section of the population are in a precarious position because of their own failings (whatever they are), studies have shown that <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_and_Ideology#Reviews"> structural inequality </a> is a much bigger cause of poverty. Today we have ample studies to show how the nefarious effects of wealth inequality has affected younger generations <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-asset-economy/"> disproportionately </a>, condemning them to structural poverty. So it is wrong to claim that all those who are poor deserve it. Although the more fundamental question to ask ourselves, considering how rich we are as a country and how unextravagant UBI is (it literally is the basic amount a person needs to get by), is whether we can't provide the basics to each member of our society, whoever they are and whatever they be like. </p><p><b>UBI for Freedom </b><br /><br /> The technology philosopher Venkatesh Rao once defined <a href="https://studio.ribbonfarm.com/p/mars-and-the-meaning-of-money#details"> money </a> as something like the best co-ordination mechanism created by humans. It is the fuel that powers economic activity that then promotes human flourishing. It obviously has no inherent value except as the lifeblood of an economy. <br /><br /> When we buy goods or services with money, we abstract away all the creativity, skill, material resources, physical labour into this single unit of exchange. The seller sells all that for money so that they can turn around and buy what they need. Of all the things money can buy it can, and does, buy freedom. When a person signs up for work, more often than not they are selling 8 hours of their day so that they can do what they want to in the other 16 hours. To have money is to be able to choose what one wants to do with their time- it could be time away from any work, or to buy and use goods and services required for personal well-being or enjoyment, or in fact being able to afford resources to unlock one's full potential to make more money or to create something else of value. But the weird thing about money is that it can be passed on inter-generationally within a family, so that gives some of us more freedom to begin with and others less. Freedom to access certain institutions, certain forms of knowledge, certain tools and comforts. And those can turn into staggeringly large advantages compared to those born into lesser money. The economist Prof. Karthik Muralidharan in regard to a country’s <a href="https://seenunseen.in/episodes/2020/8/9/episode-185-fixing-indian-education/"> educational policies </a> once said, and I paraphrase, "A society does best when all children start with the same resources and then they end up in a place they deserve. But the motive of every parent is to provide their child as much advantage as they can afford. That is the strange paradox”. <br /><br /> Another aspect of money is its information signalling capability. The argument is that since people make transactions of their own free volition in the marketplace, flows of money can be used to gauge what people value most and who is providing the most value, thereby incentivising entrepreneurs to produce most of what's in demand. It is the ability of individuals to participate in the marketplace that encourages them to buy and sell, thereby increasing their income and wealth while also providing what society values most (the famous '<a href="https://abcnews.go.com/2020/story?id=3231572">Double Thank you Moment</a>'). But what if an individual is locked out of the marketplace because they hardly have any money to even have their presence felt. That is what poverty is- it is an exclusion from the realm in which one can get rich. In a society that stringently upholds rules and rights of private property ownership, do we define those who don't have property and have been locked out of the legal methods to try and acquire it as non-citizens? And that's only one side of the equation; On the other side producers who stand to benefit from the sale of their goods to those in need cannot do it because those without money are not able to voice their preferences- because the only way to do it is via money. <br /><br /> And this is where the initial co-ordination characteristic of money comes in- it is of no good except as a way for society to communicate with itself. UBI seeks to correct the flaw in markets by providing those in most need to voice what they want. It is foolish to expect citizens of a society to have real political and social freedoms without economic freedom (in fact, traditionally depriving an individual of economic freedom was the most coercive way of curtailing their other freedoms), and like every citizen has a right to vote or be the way they wish to, they should also be able to afford a minimum, dignified lifestyle. </p><p><b>UBI for Virtue</b> <br /><br /> In a popular TED talk, the designer Thomas Twaites talks about his attempt to <a href="https://www.ted.com/talks/thomas_thwaites_how_i_built_a_toaster_from_scratch"> build a toaster from scratch </a> - an innocuous, everyday, "dumb" toaster and soon realises that he can't even properly source a few of the 400 or so components required to build it. Fascinatingly, he does not acknowledge what a huge advantage he already has- of all the cumulative knowledge that tells him what a toaster is, how it works and how he can go about building one. That knowledge is part of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commons">commons</a>, a shared bounty that belongs to all. While of course we should celebrate and reward those among us who create something valuable, it is imperative to remember that any new invention is not possible without the cumulative immense contributions of before. We, like bees, are an interlinked and interdependent species, more so as we advance technologically further where the proportion of an individual's knowledge keeps getting smaller in comparison to all the knowledge in the world. The fact that some people can have so much while many have so little is not, largely, because of inherent differences as much as how we have shaped our institutions, how power is so unequally distributed, and dumb luck. <br /><br /> The other aspect of this argument is how the market does not value the contributions of those who are responsible for taking care of the young or the old or the ill informally, or those who are producing work that the market doesn't understand or is incapable of valuing at this point in time- writers, artists, intellectuals, social workers, conservationists who are not necessarily, or entirely, motivated by money but nonetheless use their time and skill creating immense value and contributing to the greater good. Not all values can be, or should be, measured by money and thank heavens for that. <br /><br /> But this too is an instrumentalist argument. At the end of the day, a known fact is that right now in the world, we have the ability to ensure that every human in the world has enough to live at a certain level of dignity- we <a href="https://news.un.org/en/story/2019/10/1048452">produce</a> enough that, at least in a material aspect, no human has to suffer. The fact that there is as much poverty then is an indictment of our generation. We cannot let that happen and UBI is a good way for us to ensure that. <br /></p>sirish adityahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02692112394097540205noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5208559520594563111.post-54107391222904842682023-08-25T04:56:00.001+05:302023-09-17T18:13:18.308+05:30majaa aagaya<p>For the past few months, I've been flitting between two extremes of a certain dichotomy where I try to cut off completely from reading on my phone or computer, watching anything new, listening to any podcasts vs immersing myself extremely into those acts, desperately seeking anything that'll hold my attention for a while. For a week I do one with the first couple of days being super enjoyable until a nagging feeling starts cropping up. Slowly my mind keeps dropping hints at why the other way is the better way until I give in at the end of the week. And I don't give in apprehensively or gently but just jump right in and go cold turkey on the other. That works for a couple of days until the pattern starts repeating. So essentially what that means is that I delete and re-download apps like Evernote, Feedly, Pocket, Libby, PocketCasts etc. multiple times a year. It's bizarre how my mind seems to refuse to learn; also pathetic, exhausting and somewhat, a tiny bit, endearing. Should I just give in to each moment, reading, listening to, feeling, jotting down whatever I'm feeling or do I not let so many moments tyrranise me but transcend these ephemeral sensations and wait for something deeper, more profound, more long-living to approach me. Should I celebrate the atomicity of each individual sensation or desperately seek to extract as much utility from each of them for better narrativisation. Both those thoughts seem to desire the same thing though: clarity, adulation and the right kind of mental quiet. <br /></p><p>Of all the sights and sounds and events of our 15-day long Japan trip, the most memorable has been the evening before our return when for an hour around dusk, after they'd closed the temple, Sravani and I sat amidst the crowds at Sensoji and she sang, among others, <a href="https://youtu.be/eXF9KN_IcWU" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">అందాల</a> <a href="https://youtu.be/_kY8XUELPbQ" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">ఆమని</a>, <a href="https://youtu.be/usHxiwMv02E" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">మనసౌనె ఓ రాధ</a>, <a href="https://youtu.be/Ijs9fwiLe3k" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">శ్రీ</a> <a href="https://youtu.be/eUYeF9C1llY" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">కృష్ణాయను</a>, <a href="https://youtu.be/wNe_cyklB_I" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">తెలిసిరామచింతనతో</a>, <a href="https://youtu.be/ZKI_a1D_79U" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">మనసా వాచా</a>. It was beautiful and like Meheranna writes in ముక్కు, I knew it was going to become a terrific memory right then. I've been thinking of that scene for the last one week and my feeling is that creating memories is also a conscious process, not in the sense that we literally create them but that its almost an involuntary, deeply honed habit (background job) akin to narrativisation that's constantly sifting through and rearranging scenes to create <a href="https://images.app.goo.gl/gieX8E7ybn5UXfBw7" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">powerful versions</a>. The memory-generating procedure, which in some ways is the act of telling stories to ourselves, follows certain aesthetic guidelines, and to be good they have to have strong images, settings and, most importantly, a certain kind of incongruity that makes them interesting enough to standout. And I sense that rather than create a scene around all the ramen or the bullet trains or the pop culture or the Shinto temples, which are rather obvious, a stronger impression is formed when one puts together a temple in Tokyo and తెలుగు లలిత గీతాలు.</p><p>Another interesting aspect for me is that that particular scene is not representative of the whole trip, we only did that once and our trip infact had lot of other touristy and personally exciting events, but acts more like a portal (metonym?) that then links to other aspects of the trip. For instance, when I think of our Italy trip, of all the wonderful sights, the key to opening that (imaginary) room is the evening ride from Ravello to Tramonti, and how I was overawed by the shade of light. And the single image from the Fiji trip is of my swimming laps in the 50m pool as light was fading and people were settling down for dinner amidst candles. Ofcourse, the more I conscisouly exalt them the more they're burnished but the question then becomes do they gain more power or lose all specificity and meaning (a version of semantic satiation).<br /></p><p>I read two superb, and unexpectedly related, essays at work last Wednesday- One was <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/08/21/the-man-who-organized-nature-the-life-of-linnaeus-gunnar-broberg-book-review" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Kathryn Schulz's piece on Carl Linnaeus</a> in The New Yorker, and the other one was a long bookmarked essay in Daedalus called <a href="https://direct.mit.edu/daed/article/152/1/225/115009/The-Moral-Economy-of-High-Tech-Modernism" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Moral Economy of High-Tech Modernism</a>. Both of them have to do with the link between how we theorise and classify the world, and how if that is only a convenient structure for us to understand or if infact we're discovering qualities that are inherent. Also, possibly owing to the stage of development we're in as a civilisation, both of them are not content with making these first-order remarks. They go on to ruminate about how our assumptions, biases and approaches then shape our own thinking thereby reflexing shaping the fields of enquiry further. While it is undoubtedly interesting, it is also an important question because a lot of our expecations of ourselves and others in our lives comes from the assumption that we're all playing certain roles and need to behave (and feel) in certain ways. But as everyone can attest to, more often than not those categorisations only put us in a straitjacket to curtain our freedoms, whims and erratic(!) behaviours. Which also explains why creating fundamental changes in society are so hard- we don't know what our roles and responsibilities are. And so it is imperative to keep investigating the categories we assign ourselves to.<br /></p><p>My enjoyment and learning from both those essays was immensely compounded by a book I'd started reading earlier- Jonardon Ganeri's Philosophy in Classical India: The Proper Work of Reason. I've been reading Prof. Ganeri since discovering Peter Adamson's wonderful podcast <a href="https://historyofphilosophy.net/series/classical-indian-philosophy" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps</a> during Sydney's 2021 lockdown. While I haven't finished either of The Lost Age of Reason or Classical Indian Philosophy (nothing unusual there, I guess), their basic explanation of the Pramanas (ways of gaining knowledge: Perception, Inference, Analogy and Testimony) and that the six Astika schools being originally six methodologies for understanding and argument is one of the most basic tools (after a basic application of the Theory of Evolution) I use when I'm actively thinking of something. His clear elucidation that reason is a powerful tool that needs to be used judiciously, that <i>Vitanda</i> is the act of undermining the other's argument without being able to offer an alternative of one's own, and that one of the primary uses/ responsibilities of cognition is to be able to integrate the information coming from sensory organs with prior experience to gain a better understanding of reality and thus help one act better by extrapolating have been immensely clarifying. I found so much in common between his explanation and what I'd read in Prof. Anil Seth's Being You (the mind is an internal physiological state thermometer among other things) and Prof. Nicholas Humphrey's The Inner Eye (we look within to better understand how to understand, and predict, the behaviour of others).</p><p>Around the same time I discovered Prof. Amit Chaudhuri's super interesting talk called <a href="https://youtu.be/k12lzl6DWAk" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">What Kind of Music Is This?</a> In it he says that he wants to write a book with only opening paragraphs. He elaborates it with a simple example: Imagine a man sitting in a room. He's sitting at his desk and maybe looking out the window. It's not yet dawn and quiet, and he's looking out of the window lost in contemplation. And Prof. Chaudhuri says I want to stop there. Because in the second paragaraph the writer has to provide context and reasons to justify him sitting there thinking. The writer has to create a narrative which then has to follow one of the expectant paths, and can only deviate so much even when it wants to. But before that narrative takes over, the original scene of contemplation has immense possibilities. And that's where Prof. Chaudhuri wants to stop. From that opening salvo, he jumps into the differences between Western Music (where representation of an experience or a situation is the primary motive) and Hindustani Music (which does not worry about representation as much as chooses to create a space for something else). Its a somewhat challenging albeit invigorating talk.</p><p>Sravani and I also met Senator Mehreen Faruqi for coffee yesterday and she was lovely and super charming. We met her in June at a Greens event in Narrabeen and had been planning this coffee catchup since. I'll probably elaborate on that later.</p><p>Today I had a long, multi-hour, incredible conversation with Dheeraj where we tripped over Meheranna, Madhav garu, his upcoming book, Modi, desi reactions to Chandrayaan, Saagara Sangamam, Naipaul, growing old(er) among quite a few other things. We spoke for a bit about form, and both of us felt we had one or more epiphanic moments when trying to understand how we approach a book vs a facebook post vs reading a poem while scrolling online etc. and he said something beautiful- "కథ/ళ అంటే స్వయంప్రతిపత్తి ఉన్న ప్రపంచం ఉండాలె". That felt so true.</p><p>Meheranna's new book is coming out పండగహో! </p><p>P.S: How long has it been since I sat in the darkness at night and blogged listening to instrumental music - Only Lovers Left Alive and Amelie soundtracks.</p><p>P.P.S: Reg the title: Man, <a href="https://youtu.be/rc2ft794XNI" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Kaala</a>!! <br /></p>sirish adityahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02692112394097540205noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5208559520594563111.post-73454074638907123672023-08-03T09:17:00.002+05:302023-08-05T18:07:06.271+05:30for many things, arigato gozaimasu<p>As I sit in the Thunderbird 18, from Kanazawa to Kyoto, lulled by the gorgeous rhymths of the train, I get back to thinking about the question of Why One Travels. If one of my fundamental theories is correct, then we do whatever we do for one or more of the following reasons: Utility, Pleasure and Signalling. It is easier to understand the signalling aspect of travel (Oh! look at us we're so worldly and well-travelled) and the pleasure aspect (Being able to get away from the routines and responsilibites, the thrill of seeing new sites and trying new things, the freedom, atleast in theory, that your open day allows) but, being the amateur evolutionist that I am, it is the component of utility that most intrigues me. I want all these sights and smells and sounds and tastes to do something to me, to somehow transform me for the better, to inspire me, to give me memories and data for me to look back later in life and marvel at what all I've managed to see/ do. Understandably though I don't know what the end result should look like. It is, in a way, a pilgrimage only that you're not visiting a shrine with a list of wishes but are going for <i>darshan</i>, to see and marvel and let the deity shower its blessings on you. Its absolutely fascinating, all that we do without enquiring, let alone discovering, what motivates our actions. </p><p>Travel in itself is such a rich metaphor, actually a microcosm, for life itself that it seems little wonder that so many storytellers love portraying journeys. There are moments when I want to get super busy and 'extract' and stuff my mind with as many sights and sounds as I can that I can then use to weave into stories for an audience when I get back home. Other times I want to use the unregimented nature of these days to take a breather and think a bit about my own life and projects I want to work on etc. And there are times when I want to zoom out and just look at the narrative of my own life, and how far I've come in the, especially, last 2 years. Travel used to create immense melancholy inside me- I'd just be overawed at the size and complexity of the world, and how I'd never be able to learn even about a tiny part of it. In the last couple of years though I've started enjoying it a lot more- I'm already making plans to visit Hungary and Czechia this time next year. Ofcourse a part of it is simply how I've changed from being lost a lot in my head to shfiting the focus to more sensual and material pleasures- less theory, more practice as it were. I've replaced guilt with a shrug so that helps too. I definitely read and research less, and strive less to know- This is an aspect I don't appreciate as much but its helping my mental health immensely. Most importantly, I'm not seeking, beseeching answers (clarity & consistency) from life as I used to. Part of it is middle-aged laziness and just walking with the tribe and forsaking some of the individualist streak, part of it is genuine happiness with my activities and dividing life into projects (with all the faults and limitations of that approach) instead of travelling with the big, convoluted, shape-shifting mess in my head, and part of it is something akin to resignation but not that negative- more to do with understanding and accepting my own smallness but not letting it turn into fatalism. I suppose all this is a roundabout way of saying I'm in that state of my life where I'm mentally, emotionally, physically comfortable (ofcourse there are bad days but they're few) and with the intertia has set in a comforting certainty in ones assumptions and priors. Which, when I think about it, makes me slightly nervous and wary because for the first time in years I'm not being somewhat-paranoid and taking my eye off the ball more and more, and I know this is the exact time (as the prophecies in myths tell us) when the black swan event will hit me. I don't know if my act of not letting that knowledge affect me too much is hubris or intelligence.</p><p>Tokyo was an absolute blast- the scale of the city is absolutely jaw-dropping. After 4 busy days of ramen eating and 20km-a-day walking and art-gallery-and-museum hopping and street kart driving and sovenir shopping and day trip to Mt. Fuji and bullet train riding and seeing manga-and-anime shops and visiting the Imperial Palace, it was a good respite to spend a much more relaxed day in Kanazawa. Now, onto Kyoto which I'm excited about but put one way I'm content with the trip already- it has been pucca paisa-vasool (I wish there was a less cringe-inducing replacement to that phrase). The Fuji day trip was sort of disappointing reminding us in its commercialisation a lot of the Blue Mountains Park. The mountain itself, despite being only partially visible, was a sight to behold and the Shinkansen onward journey was good fun. But the multi-phased journey, that went on and on for about 3 hours didn’t seem worth it. Having said that, we’d still have been unhappy if on a 15-day Japan trip we wouldn’t have seen Fuji. So dammed either way. But I guess, going back to the long-journeys-are-microcosms thought, not only is some disappointment inevitable but also desirable. Or maybe they're the lies we tell ourselves to make life more manageable which, again, when you think about it, is probably not a bad thing at all. </p><p>I've been documenting the journey with a lot of my 15-second-ish clips that I hope to turn into a film when I get back. By manipulating and working with that material, by aesthetically and interestingly decontextualising those images and sounds, I hope to reveal and communicate a certain part of travel which is about still going through time, as always, but that's spedup or slowed down owing to the newer experiences. One of the interesting things that’s happened to me over the last few months, since the seed of day night day night started to germinate in my head, has been how useful shooting/ writing are to focusing one’s consciousness. I used to think that by engaging in capture meant missing out on a certain kind of expansive pure experience but now I’m beginning to understand how it has its uses, in forcing one to focus on what’s in the frame. It must be said though that what film gives it also takes away. What it provides in spatial context, in the immediacy of being, it takes away in temporal context- material, spiritual, and mythical. Film forces you to see out but I'm not sure if at the cost of seeing in. I'm also logging places and tracing paths on maps because that too will provide a different view into the trip. Finally, because neither of those will provide the most direct access to the thoughts swirling in my head which admittedly are quite few - the medium has changed the fuckin' message - I'm blogging. Now, because my primary focus is on images, I'm not asking interesting questions of history, culture, socioeconomics but spending more time in trying to the capture the sensual experience. I'm both relieved with the lack of incessant chatter in my head and also missing the interesting (atleast for myself) questions and theories that pop up. </p><div data-en-clipboard="true" data-pm-slice="1 1 ["ol",{"style":null,"start":null,"backgroundColor":null,"color":null,"lineHeight":null,"listStyleType":null},"li",{"style":null,"checked":null,"value":null,"displayValue":14,"backgroundColor":null,"color":null,"listStyleType":null}]">P.S- I think part of the reason we buy souvenirs on vacation is because they become totems for the feelings we want to bottle up and take home- both as inspiration and reminder. <br /></div><p> </p><p></p>sirish adityahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02692112394097540205noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5208559520594563111.post-83289197546338364052023-06-24T11:28:00.002+05:302023-08-02T19:21:41.900+05:30er, arty stuff<p>I made a short film in Apr and May 2023- day night day night. I owe the title to Julia Loktev's film.<br /></p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/dPu7s4wNmNY" width="320" youtube-src-id="dPu7s4wNmNY"></iframe></div><br /><p></p><p>Also, between Jan and Jun 2023, I embarked on a solo podcast which only Sravani knew about. I recorded a poem everyday, and while the quality slowly went from atrocious to just terrible, I'm glad I persisted in reading a poem a day- <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/29frMyKYoOuG5w7RMzcDVz" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">almost a remembrance</a>. </p><p>I owe this title to a John Keats' quote- “Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity—it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.”</p><p>--</p><p>Also, I mailed Meheranna a few thoughts after reading DFW's essay on Joseph's Frank's Dostoevsky in Consider the Lobster. His response was brilliant and succinct, and I'll check with him if he's okay with me publishing it on the blog. Until then, here's what I wrote.</p><p>--<br /><br /><b><u>that old, inescapable question </u></b><br /><br />DFW's writing is dense; And busy. That much is obvious as one starts reading any of his (more accessible) non-fiction let alone his fiction. But when a little closer attention is paid, it begins to appear that the density is just an affectation or style. He usually has just one or two major themes to explore just like most essayists but unlike most his signature move has (had) been to transcribe, if not entirely accurately then atleast consciously, the process of arriving at and departing from various touchpoints. I don't mean this as criticism, infact I enjoy it more often than not, only as observation. The reason he became a zeitgeist-defining writer is because he was able to convey what it felt like to live in a (late-capitalist/ proto-internet) society where the sensory overload was extreme and in which one had to work really hard to get to the crux of one's thoughts.</p><p>Let me illustrate my statements by analysing this particular essay. The two main themes of the essay are: how Frank's biography belongs to that old(-fashioned) species, earnest and straightforward, against the more fashionable types (ex: theory-driven, ideologically-motivated etc.)<br />why Dostoevsky (hereafter FMD) is still relevant and how his 150-year old preoccupations are still grander and deeper than contemporary fiction.</p><p>He contrasts Frank's approach from more ideological academic writers, for whom he seems to have special contempt, and uses that 'more genuine' style to comment on FMD's writing itself. DFW thinks that Frank gets FMD, that his reading is the most apt, because both of them put the individual and the conundrums of the heart front-and-centre of their work. FMD is grappling with his debts, addictions, the in-flux social context of Russia, overarching ideological narratives but equally, if not more, he is grappling with more personal (existential, ha!) feelings of faith and morality. And Frank's approach is to consider all of them to explain why he wrote what he did. </p><p>For the same reasons, obviously, DFW exalts FMD because of the passion of his moral dilemmas and the earnestness with which he approaches them. There is no distance, ironic (DFW's pet peeve) or otherwise, between the writer and his characters. There is no post-Joycean obsession with form nor a pathological belief, of the mid-twentieth century, that aesthetics is the only ideology that matters#.</p><p>FMD is concerned with the question of How to Live in a rapidly chanding world where older notions of morality and metaphysics are fast losing ground. The essay argues that FMD is the precursor, probably even an important motivation, to Nietzche's thought to whom we can trace back our contemporary atheism (that's actually too strong a word, maybe it should be called the post-faith condition). I don't know enough to comment on that but it does indeed seem like the questions and dilemmas of his time are what we ought to have if only we weren't so fatalistic. </p><p>It is probably too late to bring back that innocent striving by dialing back the cynicism. So what do we do? Not incidentally, considering his preoccupations, DFW tried to make Post-Post-Modernism the way out (what he also called New Sincerity). <br /><br />In a world where Faith doesn't have much currency, Aesthetics is insufficient, Politics is too temperamental, where do we turn to for, I ask this with a straightface, Moral Instruction? What decides our behaviour cannot be instinct/ myopic selfishness or social conditioning (sanctioning?) alone; So what should fill that space? How do I design/ identify my Dharma as a thinking-and-acting being in the world?<br /><br />#He has a beautiful line in there about aesthetics replacing metaphysics.</p>sirish adityahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02692112394097540205noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5208559520594563111.post-37104030925655833932023-05-22T10:29:00.001+05:302023-05-22T10:29:44.474+05:30will in the world1<p>There is a beautiful, beguiling and somewhat dissatisfying line in అలా మొదలైంది when, on being asked how he'd know that he's met his soulmate, the mother <a href="https://youtu.be/YNMMGBinRUs" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">tells</a> the son- "నువ్వు డిసైడ్ అయినప్పుడు". కానీ డిసైడ్ అయ్యెదే ఎలా?, not just about the topic at hand but about anything at all. Its a question that's haunted me for over two decades and I've only recently managed to tame it though I don't know if that's a sign of maturity or resignation. </p><p>The surprise Blue Mountains trip gave me enough <i>focused meandering</i><sup>2</sup> time to think about and reach a conclusion about this whole question of what to do with one's life - atleast for the time being. The crux of the problem has been the taekwondo between everyday/ hour for itself vs embarking on (and more importantly, finishing) long-term projects. My brain has gotten quite good at finding good rationale for the other when I'm in one mode forcing me to abandon, and abandon again ad infinitum<sup>3</sup>. I won't get into elaborating on that tussle because 1. its exhausting to think about and, 2. isn't that all I've done across the lifetime of this blog?</p><p>The trigger for this phase transition has been the conversation I had with Sravani a couple of weeks ago about wanting to abandon my marathon plans because it was getting tough/ I wasn't making much progress/ well, why should I stick to something I decided many months ago when my present, current, in-your-face immediate self tells me to do something else. Instead of confronting my emotions that have to do with the shame and guilt of abandoning another thing, she coolly and logically pointed at something I somehow never saw- Living everyday for itself, as if it were your last, probably sounds nice and adventurous but it is neither true nor rational. For all days of your life there has been a tomorrow where you've had to pick up from the day before. So to not embark on long-term projects with a Hey, Who Knows attitude is going to leave you worse off on way more days than you'd like. It was so brutal and refreshing in that jump-into-cold-water fashion that I couldn't refute it. I probably would've had a easy escape response to emotional or metaphysical objections but had none for that dose of rationality. Damn, I'd been stumped on my home ground.</p><p>The other important bit has been hovering around me for about a year now, something I'd articulated with a lot of pain and struggle in థియరీ & ప్రాక్టీస్ - Theory & Practice, and that I grokked into yesterday while our drive back. It was a beautiful day and I've always sneered at people who obsessively take photos/ videos of their trips but thanks to the <a href="https://youtu.be/dPu7s4wNmNY" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">day night/ day night</a> project I was less reluctant to start shooting. Which is when a weird truth hit me: that I was more focused on the road and the surroundings when I was looking through a phone screen than when I was allowing it to enter unmediated. <strike>So the entire notion of purer (for which I don't have an unvague definition) being better went out the window.</strike> I see atleast 2 reasons for that:</p><p>1. Like Gillian Flynn puts it in Gone Girl regarding those of us who grew up on tv, that is in essence is our reality and the real-reality only exists to provide raw material to tv/ internet/ other media. I see quite a great deal of truth in this statement. We are shaped and tuned by technologies we use and the more we use something, the more natural that feels<sup>4</sup>.</p><p>2. On the other hand, an explanation I was reading on Reddit yesterday seems plausible too- That reality is both too vast and fairly uniform across large chunks of time so when its compressed it gets more intense and so in our heads, when viewed through other media and not just our sense organs, gives more bang for the buck- seems more memorable and deeper. This explanation presupposes that the mind<sup>5</sup> indeed resembles a computer and so the better the algorithm, the more space and time-efficient the processing and so the better the end result.<br /></p>That's somewhat of a digression. What I felt at the moment though was that not only does it seem incredibly hard (impossible?) to not curate but also seems illogical to avoid curation<sup>6</sup>, if not obsessively then atleast semi-regularly. I don't know if we are capable of (or even if its desirable) collecting all sights and sounds and ideas and emotions objectively that we can at some later point use to create/ curate our artwork. The only way to go about it is to constantly keep creating (in this sense, theorising) and keep testing those hypothesis. Art is what happens as an effect, both intended and serendipituous, of the imposition of the will on the world<sup>7</sup>.<br /><p><sup>1</sup>From Stephen Greenblatt's book which I haven't read yet but who's brilliant Tanner Lecture I highly recommend <br /></p><p><sup>2</sup>From the tagline of Raghuveer Kovuru's short-lived <a href="https://www.facebook.com/Streamthetab/photos" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Stream magazine</a><br /></p><p><sup>3</sup>It's nothing many people before me haven't grappled with but I doubt if many have communicated it as charmingly and exasperatingly as Geoff Dyer</p><p><sup>4</sup>The Convivial Society, Amusing Ourselves to Death, Capitalist Realism et al</p><p><sup>5</sup>Can I use it interchangably with brain?</p><p><sup>6</sup>"అసలు నరేటివ్ అంటేనే ఇంపొసిషన్. ఏం ఇంపోస్ చేయాలి అని నిర్ణయించేది రచయిత విజ్ఞత. కానీ నా గొడవంతా ఆ నిర్ణయం తీసుకోకుండా ఎలా తప్పించుకోవాలని."</p><p><sup>7</sup>Just to be clear to myself this post right here isn't art. It is an unspooling of thoughts with minor editorial changes. Art is something else, something that's more about the world than about me. I think its also a skill I should develop- looking out as much as I look in.<br /></p>sirish adityahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02692112394097540205noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5208559520594563111.post-2725075841535193842023-04-23T16:50:00.002+05:302023-05-25T06:45:12.839+05:30talking to about myself<p>Certain young men<sup>1</sup> seem to go through a phase where they feel so alienated from the world that reality almost bears no resemblance with what's going on in their heads. In his introduction to Dr. Kesava Reddy's City Beautiful, Kasibhatla Venugopal touches on the difference between the literary techniques of Stream of Consciousness and Interior Monologue. I think its a very good dichotomy to explain the difference between 'normal' people and these boy-men. All of us have a certain voice in the head that comments on, elaborates and posits on the events happening outside. But for those boys (I could be wrong- it could be all types of people across all ages but in the popular imagination its almost always young men), the monologue<sup>2</sup> takes over. It in many ways distorts reality because that is the only way for it to feel powerful and special. Now I call it narcissism, it was once called individuality.</p><p>The reason I'm able to declare that with such uncharacteristic confidence is because I was one of those young men once, and ofcourse there are still remnants, and those thoughts have come rushing out since I started reading City Beautiful yesterday. I place it next to JD Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye and Tripuraneni Gopichand's Asmarthuni Jivayatra, and the autobiographical personas created by David Foster Wallace and Geoff Dyer<sup>6</sup>. </p><p>I haven't read Catcher in over a decade but I couldn't stop thinking about it while reading this book<sup>3</sup>. I still remember the afternoon when Dhruti first told me about it. I think it was during the holidays after Inter (or was it 10th? I think it was inter) and we were returning from CMC in Gaddiannaram. It had just stopped raining but the roads were still damp. I was passionately ranting and whining about something as usual<sup>4</sup> and we'd just crossed the Kanaka Durga temple near Dilsukh Nagar busstop when she said, "You know my dad gave me this book the other day and that narrator never stops complaining throughout. It reminded me so much of you". I think she gave it to me the next day and I remember reading it in a state of daze that evening. It was like encountering a more articulate but more relentlessly whiny version of myself. I was probably both immeasurably grateful (that someone got me) but also somewhat pissed (hey, I thought I was unique). I remained like that for a very long time. </p><p>Then when I read Asamarthuni in my mid-20s, I recognised him and felt some sympathy to his plight, but I also had grownup a little to judge him a little more harshly. I probably enjoyed it more than I let on but when I gave to to Amma with high recommendations, she said it was exhausting. But I knew that guy- I knew the escapism, the confusion, the cowardice, but also the idealism and the romantic heart. I also recognised the self-centredness and the solipsism. The shallow clarity and deeper confusion that comes from reading/ watching haphazardly before forming a strong moral core<sup>5</sup>.</p><p>This book is thematically and tonally very similar; Just that in parts its also laugh-out-loud funny. Devidasu's version of Phony is Imbecile so he compounds that word with Telugu and English cusswords. It now strikes me that Raskolnikov is also a hero cut from the same cloth, so is there a larger tradition of the romantic-loser protagonist in Modern Western(ised) literature? </p><p>I am surprised with how much I loved reading the book when I thought I'd outgrown that phase and didn't have time for self-conceited, ironic young men. So it was all the more bizarre when I was reminded of my own Theory & Practice multiple times. I can see that comparing those works with my own story can come off as unearned and arrogant, but if I'm being honest (I'll leave the qualitative judgement to readers), they did feel closely related. My film Based on a True Story is also part of the same universe in that unwordly young guys have delusions of greatness but are also hamstrung by their clear knowledge of lack of firsthand experience. The difference is that those guys were forced to confront their cluelesness more directly because they were dealing with images and stories, not ideas and opinions.</p><p>Like a lot of what I write, T&P too came from a place of strong feeling than any conscious agenda so I wasn't able to recognise then how it too sprung from being that teenager and reading Catcher about a decade-and-a-half ago. For all its iterations and the edits Madhav garu made, I think it is a good story and has some really good bits. I still enjoy reading the climactic epiphany and the monologue on the nature of epiphanies because I managed to capture very closely a feeling that I have and love. </p><p>I'm more worldly now, more evolved and a better person I think. That came from coming out of my head and dealing with reality better, trying to understand the way the world works, genuinely caring and wanting to know about people. But it also comes from compromising more, losing idealism, lowering expectations of myself. If I'm being charitable, I suppose this is growing up. So when I see that there remain shades of that person from all those years ago, it feels good. It feels like I've been on a journey, that I have a history, that I've seen and learnt and experienced and changed, that I'm somewhat interesting, that my life isn't all a worthless illusion. That one day if I go on The Seen and the Unseen, I'll have a bit to talk about my personal history and what led to me being me. It means I have a personality and that does sound nice.<br /></p><p><sup>1</sup>I should do a post on my favourite Ebert lines. Top of my head- Certain young men from Into the Wild, definition of Epic from Lawrence of Arabia, Rational Men vs Human line from Searching for Bobby Fisher and the one about the loneliness of priests from To the Wonder</p><p><sup>2</sup>"It is extremely difficult to stay alert & attentive instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monolog inside your head" -DFW<br /></p><p><sup>3</sup>A large reason for that was Dr. Kesava Reddy mentioning it as a major influence in the foreword. I should probably stop reading forewords first</p><p><sup>4</sup>I remember a phrase from her Orkut testimonial where she said, after listing a bunch of stuff from films to books to people,"..deni gurinchaina gantalu gantalu mottukuntadu". Bless her soul</p><p><sup>5</sup>The liberal aspect of me assures that that's how it should be. But I've lived long enough to realise that that's not an unequivocal good</p><p><sup>6</sup>Funny enough, even though I adore Meheranna's fiction there isn't a protagonist I relate to as much. Some of the images and mental states he conjures are magical and achingly familiar but not entire characters<br /></p>sirish adityahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02692112394097540205noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5208559520594563111.post-78963947813227091822023-04-20T08:23:00.004+05:302023-05-22T10:37:10.917+05:30when you digress from the digression there's always an outside chance of coming back to where you veered off from in the first place<p>Towards the end of a long, far-ranging conversation I was having with Ant on Tuesday, I happened to utter the rather profound line- "Non-negotiables can wait". We were talking about how, as we grow older, we prefer to stay back home rather than go out to party and get wasted on weekends because you'd rather not play catchup during the week. A large chunk of growing up is learning to say no immediate gratifications. So far, so fair- but the flipside of that temperament is also the reduction of zones of serendipity and thus a foreclosure of transcendent possibilities. What that also does is elevate the tangible over the intangible, and it is no surprise that as we grow older we get more obsessed with money because it genuinely is a terrific tangible medium of exchange. I'd mentioned earlier in that conversation that I'd gone to watch a 35mm presentation of 2001: A Space Odyssey during Easter weekend and he said he loved that film. So at this point I posed him a thought experiment: "If you had to choose between getting to watch that film in the theatre now vs being paid $1000, what'd you choose?". He laughingly said, "Thousand obviously because I can buy a DVD and keep the rest" to which I responded, "See that's exactly the problem. The joy you will get out of watching the film is real, immediate and memorable and yet we rationally choose to take the money. Not because its somehow better but because we've gotten used to exalting the tangible over the ephemeral which nonetheless is real" [Or a version of those words]. We then riffed for a bit on chores and work deliverables and how that permeates a lot of what we choose to do even on holidays and it went on like that for a bit before I had to get off at Parra.</p><p>--</p><p>Back in the day when we were obsessed with Naipaul, Deekshith told me of an incident where during an interview, he [i.e., Naipaul] pointed to a stack of all his books and said, "Everything I am is in there" and I remember going Aww over it. While it is probably not true (Don't all of us like to believe there's something more to us than what's out there already) and an exercise in delusional arrogance to compare what I do here to Naipaul's work, I sometimes feel the same way about this blog. That all that there's to me is in (if not should be) in here. In his wonderful episode with Amit Varma, Chandrahas Chaudhury says that when he sits down to read a book he does so with a certain sense of respect and humility because when he is encountering the best, most thoughtful version of the writer, it is on him to offer his best version too. I think its a lovely, charming practice. And yet as a quasi-writer, I seem to be incapable of doing that. It seems to me that what I should put forth is not the best version but all of the bad, the ugly and whatever little of the good. While a large part of it comes from my lack of discipline, inability to revise, hubris and frivolousness, atleast a sliver of it is motivated by what Kaufman said in his BFI speech- "..if you’re honest about who you are, you’ll help that person be less lonely in their world because that person will recognise him or herself in you and that will give them hope." I know that that is not an excuse to present mediocre work or half-finished, unapproachable thoughts or a profound lack of craft, but that is probably why for all my failings, I haven't stopped blogging - It is a medium which allows for my short, somewhat self-contained bursts of thought which when seen together hopefully presents a more coherent evolution and worldview. Despite failing repeatedly, even last week I wrote a couple of pieces in a notebook to kick this habit, I'm doing this fairly frequently - comfortable in the knowledge that this the right thing to do. I really don't know if its genuinely my calling or intertia/ addiction but somewhere deep inside I know I'm my most natural self here. And natural is supposed to be good right? </p><p>I have been working on a couple of minor projects since Jan and April respectively. They are non-serious, almost hobbyish and there's not much work involved; I spend like 2 minutes everyday on both of them combined but I've been doing it continuously for many weeks and I'm kinda surprised with my regularity. I must reiterate that quaility of each of those daily components is sub-par but the hope is that the overall mosaic will have enough to atleast protrude above the surface. The idea, again, is not to strive and find the best, and then polish it for presentation, but on the contrary to keep making them, without much thought of artistic intentions and motivations, to both capture the prosaic and cherish the making itself. If something larger/ grander/ deeper can be coaxed out of it, it is a (happy?) side effect. I'd like to feel there's something artisinal about it but even broaching those thoughts is to fall into the artist/ curator trap. It is what it is - a slice of my day that is true to itself with all its faults, follies, cracks, and intentions. <br /></p>sirish adityahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02692112394097540205noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5208559520594563111.post-7543553968151265512023-04-05T10:34:00.001+05:302023-04-05T10:34:33.398+05:30Melbourne, you beauty<p>01/Apr/2023 | Melbourne </p><p>One of the things that irks me a lot during a discussion, that usually devolves into an argument, is when the other person refuses to consider other approaches/ justifications that are being put forward. It seems to be tunnel vision that prevents them from imagining, even allowing, other possibilities. Neither am I the first person to notice this<sup>1</sup> nor am I myself immune to this phenomenon- as it becomes apparent to me at the end of many passionate conversations with Payal anna. While the stubbornness is somewhat understandable, they are after all our opinions and we've thought and talked about them long enough to both shape ourselves and find good rhetorical tools, I nonetheless find that attitute really troubling for the sake of society.</p><p> 1. All of us stand on arbitrary ground. Unless you are a genius or enlightened (I'm not sure if there are other categories), the most fundamental, seemingly unthinking, self-evident, axiomatic truths<sup>2</sup> of our life, are held by a sagging, messy fabric of practices and behaviours that allow you to build the inhabitations of life. We almost never have the time, knowledge nor the inclination to investigate and hit a deeper bedrock, to stand on firmer foundations<sup>3</sup>. </p><p>2. Parallelly, without that strong foundation, we feel ill-equipped to work towards building towards anything of value. It's like trying to create a business in a volatile political environment; we are reluctant because the chance of what you've built to be snatched away or crumbling down are higher. That creates hedonist infantilism<sup>4</sup> where our excuse to not spend our lives bringing any change is either because the world's too big or because any change is short-lived anyway.</p><p>05/Apr/2023 | Sydney</p><p>I had to interrupt the piece at the above point because it was time to go to the circuit and now I don't know where I'd have taken it to. Summarily speaking, I think I was riffing on the impossibility on having to live in a world where I don't have all information and where my actions don't create large-scale changes anyway. Which interestingly was triggered by something else when I wanted to write about how much I loved Melbourne this time around. Yeah, the weather's a bit erratic but the thriving CBD, the layout of parks and buildings, the crowds and the buzz was pretty incredible. </p><p>In other news, I realised earlier that my fickleness<sup>5</sup> and constantly changing interests have less to do with wanting to understand the world than it is with seeking to replicate the sense of mastery a person who knows his shit exudes<sup>6</sup>. <br /></p><p><sup>1</sup>There is a sub-genre of books elaborating on our tribalism in the age of social media</p><p><sup>2</sup>"..everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence"- David Foster Wallace <br /></p><p><sup>3</sup>The flipside of standing on shoulders of giants is that we're too far from the ground</p><p><sup>4</sup>"the hippie’s characteristic sloppiness, 'ill-fitting clothes, unkempt appearance and Fuzzed-out psychedelic fascist drug talk, displayed a disdain for sensuality'" - Mark Fisher<br /></p><p><sup>5</sup>"Cam doesn’t change the sheets as much as he changes his personality" - Modern Family</p><p><sup>6</sup>"I was starting to believe that the reason it matters to care passionately about something is that it whittles the world down to a more manageable size" - Susan Orlean<br /></p>sirish adityahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02692112394097540205noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5208559520594563111.post-2887041952304520912023-03-15T10:27:00.003+05:302023-09-29T07:34:21.408+05:30if not the self, then what?<p>Last evening Sravani and I went to see our first professional play- Bell Shakespeare's Macbeth. While the performances were good and we had an enjoyable evening, what affected me most though were the thoughts running in my head throughout the duration of the play. </p><p>My mind was constantly flipping between watching the performance on stage and the thoughts/ ideas/ memories it triggered. Every once in a while I'd go meta and see myself drifting away from the performance infront of my eyes, and either chide myself for being so self-obsessed or chastise myself for being so unfocused. One train of thought took me from Maqbool to Masala Shakespeare to Stephen Greenblatt to making a mental note to check out Will in the World. Another one was so trippy that I felt amazed to have made that leap in almost-realtime, and which catalysed this post. In the second-half of the play on being told about Birnam Wood having to move before he could be slayed, Macbeth cackles with relief because he <i>knows </i>that a wood moving is impossible. Because I knew that the prophecy would come true, it occured to me almost instantaneously that the wood moving is Macbeth's Black Swan event. It is an epistemic fallacy because he conflates knowing something to be an impossibility with it being an impossibility. After a lightning quick homage to Taleb and Popper, a book popped into my head about which I hadn't thought in months, maybe years - Stanley Cavell's Disowning Knowledge. And my mind did a (imaginary?) somersault at the prospect of independently arriving at the same conclusion as Prof. Cavell (who's book I haven't read, so I'm presuming that's what he's going to talk about). </p><p>This is one half of the story. The other half deals with something I've been going through in the last few days. Ever since I gobbled up Tarantino's novel Once upon a time in Hollywood, I've been picking and dropping books, with exasperation and increasing dread, in the hope that something might stick. Till I decided yesterday morning that the reason for my misery was my desire/ addiction to read which stems less from a desire for knowledge than for more nefarious reasons (avoid surprise/ shock, impress others, navigate better etc.), and so decided to read less and learn more from 'life firsthand'. So I literally sat in the train drinking coffee, looking around and feeling pleased with myself for putting an end to my mental gluttony and also warning myself for getting too pleased because I wasn't sure how long I could stay away from my drug fix.</p><p>So I was all prepared to watch the play <i>firsthand</i>, let myself be washed over by the sensations and emotions, and to immerse myself in the play. Only that I could do that for maybe 2 minutes before beginning to drift off on the stream of thoughts. Now my question is this- Which is the real/ most genuine me? Is it the one that's taking in the sights and sounds on stage, or the one allowing himself to be triggered by the sensations and going down rabbit holes, or the one who's watching those two and is tired of mediating between the two? Or is it that the first one is an idiot who is being affected by biochemical reactions triggered by those specific sights and sounds, or the second one an off-putting know-it-all who is so enamoured by what he knows that he refuses to see anything without harking back to what he already knows, or the third one a classic example of the modern self-conscious neurotic who is immobilised because he is so unsure of the right thing to do?</p><p>My System 1 answer is that ofcourse I'm all three and what I call myself at any point is the aspect which temporarily wins over the other two; There could be more homonculus me-s fighting it out but thankfully last night there were only three strong enough to come to <i>my </i>attention. This hypothesis comes from shallow readings of Prof. Daniel Dennett and Prof. Douglas Hofstadter and Prof. Anil Seth, compounded with the Sante Fe Complexity Podcast and a few other writers, and that I sorta kinda find useful. I don't claim to understand or agree with it but it gives me enough mental tools to deal better with myself. The System 2 answer is something I know even less of but it seems more romantic and more permanent (which also makes me doubt it more). That comes from shallow readings and hearings of Indian Philosophy and Zen, and states that the real you is beyond these thoughts and the only reason you're not able to see it is because you're too attached to these thoughts. I suppose for convenience sake let's call it the <i>Atma. </i>My first question is obviously - why would the atma, presumably calm and intelligent and real, find it so hard to seperate itself from the mind and the body? There is Karma and Vasanas and Buddhis and all that, but that only transfers the question to one of the many previous rebirths when the atma for the first time got entangled with all of this. Without getting too much into that, simply because I've never put in the effort to explore those topics with dedication, I sort of know experientially that there are uses to that philosophical approach. I can clearly see my emotions being in much better check the less I attach myself to them. For instance, the more I question the reason for my anger, the harder it becomes to hold onto it. So to a certain extent, it seems to be useful in managing myself better. So maybe the same is true for my thoughts as well- the less attached I'm to them, the more <i>open</i> I become. Yet, that gives rise to two problems.<br /></p><p>One, the notion of self seems to be inextricably tied with memories, thoughts, emotions, behaviours etc. and without those there seems to be no self at all. So when I say to myself, "Let go of your thoughts", am I not giving excessive importance to one thought at the cost of all others? What if that thought is a master parasite slowly taking over the forest of multitude ideas. What if it is wilful stupidity? I know that's a provocative thought but that's because I'm roasting the popular caricature of enlightenment. Two, doesn't that distancing mean moving away not only from emotions, memories and desires but also, eventually, thoughts and is it possible to live in the world without recourse to thought? Everything I know about the world, rules of language and math and physicality, are thoughts, aren't they, and moving away from all that fills me more with dread than with the joy of homecoming. Maybe that is a reflection of my immaturity and identifcation with the <i>wrong things</i> but that state seems like wilful death. I get the sentiment and I'm sure I, like others, fall on the spectrum between no thought and overwhelming thought/ emotion but I'm not ready to embrace absolute thoughtlessness, atleast not yet; As if the notion of I would survive that rupture.<br /></p><p>I suppose the desire for thoughtlessness comes not from <i>wanting</i> to be devoid of all movement as much as being unable to control extreme churn. Maybe it is true that the place from which the notion of I comes is different from sections responsible for other sensations vying for attention. Or maybe it is that the notion of I is a loosely emergent phenomenon that itself shapes and shifts depending on many subliminal causes. I mean eventually the entity that seeks enlightenment is also the self isn't it? Why would it want itself to be annihilated if not for self-loathing? </p><p>I think there's something deeper at play here. Both sides, the material and the spiritual, have individuals I immensely respect and who're trying to invent and communicate tools for expansion and enrichment of human experience. The idea is not to roll myself up like a rock and live without ideas, thoughts and emotions but find ways to live better with them. If anyone wants to argue otherwise, I'm happy to walk and talk; I've discovered it to be one of the best ways to go about it.<br /></p><p>So much to read, so much to learn, so much to walk.<br /></p>sirish adityahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02692112394097540205noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5208559520594563111.post-47166465224879610272023-01-30T16:34:00.002+05:302023-04-05T09:27:02.997+05:30..కలగలిపి సముద్రమంటారు<p>స్వధర్మే నిధనం శ్రేయః పరధర్మో భయావహః</p><p>చాలా ఏళ్ళ కింద ఫేస్బుక్లో స్వర్ణకమలం సినిమా మీద నేనొక పోస్ట్ చదివాను. మీనాక్షి సినిమా అంతా నా మానాన నన్నొదిలెయ్యి మొర్రో అంటున్నా చంద్రం మాత్రం తన వెంటపడుతూ, తను ఎలా బ్రతకాలో ఏం చేయాలో చెప్తూనే ఉంటాడు. చెప్పడమే కాదు తన ప్రమేయం లేకుండా తన జీవితంలో చొరబడి మరీ తన చుట్టూ ఉన్నవాళ్ళని ప్రభావితం చేస్తూ ఆ అమ్మయి మీద కొన్ని చర్యలు impose చేస్తాడు. అలా మీనాక్షి individual rights ని, ఇష్టాయిష్టాలని బేఖాతరు చేసిన వాడిని మనం హీరో అంటున్నాము, ఆ అమ్మాయి చివర్లో పరివర్తన చెందితే అది చూసి చెప్పట్లు కొడుతున్నాం. ఇదెక్కడి న్యాయం? అన్నది ఆ పోస్ట్ సారాంశం. అది చదివి కరెక్టే కదా ఇతను చెబుతున్నది అనిపించింది. చాలా ఏళ్ళ తరవాత మళ్ళీ ఆ ప్రశ్నని ఎదురుకొనేంత ధైర్యము, intellectual tools సమకూరాయి అనుకుంటూ..<br /><br />మన modern, liberal sensibility నుండి చూస్తే ఆ ఆలోచన నూటికి నూరుపాళ్ళూ సమంజసమే. ఆ అమ్మాయి తన మానాన తనుంటే ఆ అబ్బాయి అలా కాదు, నీలో ఉన్నది నువ్వు గుర్తించలేక పోతున్నావు అని వెంబడిస్తూనే ఉంటాడు. Infact, కాస్త provacativeగా చెప్పాలంటే మనం ఇప్పుడు ఏకిపారేసే ఇడియట్, అర్జున్ రెడ్డీ లాంటి సినిమాలు ఎంత anti-feminist ఓ, ఎంత హీరోయిన్లకు ఏజెన్సీ లేకుండా చేస్తారో ఇదీ అంతే. (ఇక్కడొక counter-factual: ఒకవేళ విశ్వనాథ్ గారు పాత్రలు switch చేసి హీరోయిన్ హీరో వెంబడి పడేట్టు చేసుంటే అప్పుడు కూడా మన reception ఇలానే ఉండెదా? లేక ప్రకృతిని పురుషుడు అదుపు చేయాలి అన్న remnant thought మనలో ఉండి మనం చంద్రంలోని righteousnessని సులువుగా అర్థంచేసుకుంటున్నామా?). కానీ దీంట్లో హీరో హీరోయిన్తో నాకు నువ్వు కావాలి, నీ ప్రేమ కావాలి అనడు. నీలో అపారమైన విద్వత్తుంది, అది బయటకి తీసుకొచ్చే బాధ్యతుంది అంటాడు. <br /><br />అయినా కూడా ఆ విద్వత్తుతో ఏం చేసుకుంటుందో ఆమె విజ్ఞానానికి, more importantly, ఆమె ఇష్టానికి సంబంధించిన విషయం. ఒకటో రెండో సార్లు చెప్పే హక్కు కుటుంబసభ్యులకో, స్నేహితులకో ఉంది కానీ, ముక్కు మొహం తెలియని పరాయివాడికి ఏమాత్రం హక్కు లేదు అన్నది వాదన. "నాకు ఈ కూచిపూళ్ళు, భరతనాట్యాల మీద అస్సలు మక్కువ లేదు. వాటి నుండి నాకు దమ్మిడీ ఆదాయం లేదు, ఎందుకూ పనికిరాని చెప్పట్లు, బిరుదులు తప్ప. దానికన్నా ఒక హోటల్లో concierge లా ఉద్యోగం చేస్తే నాలుగు రాళ్ళు సంపాదించుకోవచ్చు, మంచి బట్టలు కట్టుకొని ముస్తాబవచ్చు, అన్నింటినీ మించి సెలెబ్రిటీస్ని దెగ్గరి నుండి చూడొచ్చు. అదే నా ఇష్టం, నా కోరిక." (ఈ పాత్ర సాగర సంగమంలోని బాలకృష్ణకి సరిగ్గా 180°). ఇది చాలా ఆసక్తికరమైన dramatic setup. <br /><br />ఎమియ శ్రీనివాసన్ అనే తత్వవేత్త The right to sex అనే పుస్తకంలో కోరికలు (desires) గురించి ప్రస్తావిస్తూ ఇలా అంటారు: అవును, liberal society లో ప్రతి వ్యక్తికీ తనకి నచ్చినట్టు బ్రతికే హక్కు ఉంటుంది. అది inalienable right. ఆ హక్కు ఇంకొక మనిషి హక్కులకి అంతరం కలిగించనంతటి వరకు ఎవరైన వాళ్ళకి నచ్చినచ్చు ఉండొచ్చు, వాళ్ళ జీవితాన్ని వాళ్ళకి నచ్చినట్టు గడపొచ్చు, వాళ్ళ కోరికలని తీర్చుకోవచ్చు. కానీ మనం అంతటితో ఆగిపోకూడదు. మనం అడగాల్సిన మరి ప్రశ్న: ఆ మనిషికి ఆ కొరిక ఎలా పుట్టింది, ఒక పని చేయాలన్న, ఒకలా ఉండాలన్న, ఒక వస్తువు కావలన్న వాంఛ ఎక్కడినుండి వస్తుంది? అది కూడ తెలుసుకోవాలి. <br /><br />ఇదే ప్రశ్న మనం మీనక్షిని, "ఏమ్మా నీకెందుకు హోటల్లో concierge గా చేయలనుంది" అనడిగితే ఆమె బహుషా తను చూసి ప్రభావితం అవుతున్న సినిమాలనో, టీవీనో, బయట షోకుగా తిరిగే శ్రీమంతుల వల్లనో అని చెబుతుంది. ఇక్కడ ఒక విషయం స్పష్టం చేయాలి. తనకి డబ్బు సంపాదించి దరిద్రం తప్ప ఇంకేమివన్ని కళల నుండి బయట పడాలి అన్న కోరిక ఎంతుందో, గ్లామరస్గా బ్రతకాలి అన్న కోరికా అంతే ఉంది. ఈ ఫీలింగ్స్కి diagnosis ఎంతో మంది Marxist thinkers ఇచ్చారు. అందులో ఒకరయిన మార్క్ ఫిషర్ Capitalist Realism అనే పుస్తకంలో ఈ టాపిక్ని గాఢంగా పరిశీలిస్తూ Consumerist societies లో desires ని manufacture చేసి images ద్వారా disseminate చేస్తారు అంటారు. అంటే తిండి-గుడ్డ-గూడు-basic మానవ సంబంధాలు కుదిరిన మనుషులు, నెక్స్ట్ ఏంటి? అనే టైంకి అడ్వర్టైస్మెంట్లు ఇది నీకు నెక్స్ట్ కావాల్సింది, ఇది నీ కోరిక, దీనికోసం నువ్వు పరితపించాలి అని వాడి మెదడులో గూడు కట్టుకుంటాయి. అలాంటి కొత్త కోరికలు పుట్టించక పోతే Capitalist Economy చట్రం తిరగడం ఆగిపోతుంది అని వాళ్ళ వాదన.<br /><br />ఇప్పుడు తను ఎంతగానో పరితపించి పోతున్న concierge ఉద్యోగం దూరం కొండల తీరు; దాంట్లోనూ కష్టాలు లేకపోలేవు అన్న జ్ఞానోదయం మీనాక్షికి ఇప్పుడు కాకపోయినా ఇంకొన్నేళ్ళల్లో తెలుస్తుంది. దాన్నే మనం mid-life crisis అంటాము. అది సహజం. అది తెలియపర్చటానికి చంద్రం అక్కర్లేదు. కానీ ఆ అమ్మయికి ప్రస్తుతం అర్థమయ్యే పరిభాష అదే. అందుకే ఘల్లుఘల్లు పాటలో తన సంతోషం గురించే మాట్లాడతాడు- ఈ చవకైన ఆకర్షణలకు లొంగిపోకు దీనికి ఎన్నో రెట్లు ఆనందం పొందగలిగే మాధ్యమం నీలో ఉంది, దానివైపు దృష్టి పెట్టు అని వాదిస్తాడు. కానీ తన నిజ సంకల్పాన్ని శివపూజకు చిగురించిన పాటలో వెల్లడిస్తాడు. నీ self-fulfillment equation లో సగభాగమే. ఇంకో సగం నువ్వు నిర్వర్తించాల్సిన ధర్మం. చంద్రం పరితపించేదల్లా ఆ అమ్మయిలో ఉన్న అపారమైన నాట్యసంపత్తి సమాజానికి, దేశానికి అందకుండా పోతుందని. Which raises the more interesting question- What do we owe the world?<br /><br />ప్రతి సమాజంలో పౌరురాలికి హక్కులెలా ఉంటాయో, బాధ్యతలూ అలానే ఉంటాయి. Traditional Indian thought లో దాన్ని ధర్మం అంటాము. రామాయణం వినేప్పుడు నాకు చాలా ఏళ్ళు ఒక విషయం అర్థం కాలేదు. రాముడు సులువుగా పరిష్కారించ గలిగిన సమస్యలను కూడా ఎందుకు ధర్మం పేరుతో కష్టతరమైన మార్గాన్ని ఎన్నుకున్నాడని. ప్రతి మనిషికీ తన శక్తిని బట్టి, తన అవసరాల బట్టి తనకి నచ్చినట్టుంటూ, కష్టాన్ని తగ్గించుకొని సుఖాన్ని పెంచుకోవాలన్న కోరిక, హక్కు, స్వేఛ్ఛ ఉంటాయన్నది మన core assumption. కానీ దానికన్నా ఇంకో higher ideal కి aspire అయ్యేవాళ్ళ చర్యలు మనకి rational అనిపించవు. ఇది ఎక్కడో పురాణాల్లోని విషయమే కాదు, మన చుట్టూనే ఎంతో మంది ఉంటారు: భారతదేశ సంరక్షణ అన్న abstract concept కోసం యుద్ధంలో పాల్గొనే సైనికుడు, కోవిడ్ వార్డ్లో పనిచేస్తే జబ్బు చేస్తుందని తెలిసినా తన బాధ్యతని నిర్వర్తించే డాక్టారు, తన ప్రాణాన్ని పణంగా పెట్టి ప్రభుత్వానికి వ్యతిరెకమైన ఒక న్యూస్ని బయటపెట్టే జర్నలిస్ట్- వీళ్ళందరూ వాళ్ళ ధర్మాన్ని ఫాలో అవుతున్న వాళ్ళే. అంతెందుకు, మన సినిమాల్లో ప్రతీ హీరో చుట్టుపక్కన వాళ్ళ ఆలోచనలని, సూచనలని పక్కన పెట్టి వాడికి కరెక్ట్ అనిపినంచిదే చేస్తాడు. అందుకే వాడు హీరో. ఈ సినిమాలో ఒక తేడా ఏంటంటే ఆలోచన-చర్య అనే రెండు dimensions ఉండేది ఒక మనిషికి కాదు, అవి రెండు పాత్రల్లో చీల్చబడ్డాయి.</p><p>మీనాక్షి ప్రపంచానికి ఏం ఋణపడుందని చంద్రం వాదన? Especially, ప్రపంచం తనకి ఏమివ్వలేదని మీనాక్షి అస్తమానం సణుగుతున్నప్పుడు. ఆ అభిప్రాయాన్ని మార్చే ప్రయత్నమే చంద్రం చేస్తూ వస్తాడు. ప్రపంచం/ జీవితం నీకు కావాల్సింది ఇవ్వలేదేమో, కానీ అది ఇచ్చిన ప్రత్యేకమైన బహుమానాన్ని నువ్వు గుర్తించటం లేదు అంటాడు. నీకు కావలసిన దాని పట్ల నీకు వాంఛే కాదు, నీ దగ్గర ఉన్నదాని పట్ల నీకు భక్తి, కృతజ్ఞత ఉండాలి అన్న అభిప్రాయం అతనిది. తను material మాత్రమే చూడగలుగుతోంది, అతను ఆమెకు spiritual చూపించే ప్రయత్నం చేస్తున్నాడు. పద్దెనిమిదేళ్ళు దాటాయి కాబట్టి నా హక్కులు నావీ అన్నది ఆమె సిద్ధాంతం, వయసుతో నిమిత్తం లేదు ఆధ్యాత్మిక పరంగా తను ఇంకా చిన్న పిల్లేనని అతని అభిప్రాయం. ఆ రెండు worldviews మధ్య సంభాషణే సిరివెన్నెల గారి పాటలు కూడా. ప్రేక్షకులుగా మనకి ఆ అమ్మాయి అసహనం, స్వేఛ్ఛాకాంక్ష ఎలా అర్థం అవుతాయో, మీనాక్షికి తన నటవిశ్వరూప సాక్షాత్కారం కలిగించాలనే చంద్రం ఉన్నతమైన అభిలాష మీద కూడా అభిమానం ఏర్పడుతుంది. ఎవరు ఎక్కువ correct? </p><p>And there lies the brilliance of the film. ఇది ఇన్నేళ్ళుగా relevant గా ఉండటానికి కారణం. ఒక good old hero's journey format లో విశ్వనాథ్ గారు రెండు competing worldviews యొక్క clash ని ఇమడ్చారు. సినిమా చివర్లో ఒక judgement call చేస్తుంది కానీ దానితో మనం అంగీకరించాల్సిన అవసరం లేదు. (ఇంకో counter-factual: ఒకవేళ భానుప్రియ ధనవంతుల కుటుంబంలో పుట్టుండి, ఇంతే ప్రతిభ ఉండి కూడా నాట్యం చేయటానికి నిరాకరించుంటే? అప్పుడూ చంద్రానికి తన కుటుంబం అంత చనువిచ్చుండేదా?) </p><p>మీనాక్షిలో జన్మతహ (పూర్వ జన్మ సుకృతం అనేవాళ్ళూ ఉండకపోరు) అపారమైన ప్రతిభ
ఉంది. తన అక్కకి క్రమశిక్షణ, కళ పట్ల భక్తి, పరిపక్వత ఉన్నా తనకి నాట్యం
అబ్బలేదు, సంగీతమే. కానీ తనకి తన ధర్మాన్ని గుర్తించి దానికి తగ్గట్టు
బ్రతకాలన్న జ్ఞానం (acceptance అంటారు కొందరు) ఉంది. ఒక చోట, ఒకలా
పుట్టినందుకు ఒక పని చేయాలి అన్న నియమాన్ని caste అంటామని, అభినవ సమాజంలో
దానికి చోటు లేదని నేనే వాదించాను. కనీ ఇది caste కాదు; అదే అయితే అక్క
కూడా నర్తకే అయ్యుండాలి. ఇది purely individual.<br /><br />అవును మనమందరం individuals ఏ, మన వ్యక్తిగత స్వేఛ్ఛ చాలా ముఖ్యం. కానీ self అనేది ఒక concrete, static entity కాదు; అది porous, dynamic, reflexive. ఇంకో కోణం నుండి చూస్తే మీనాక్షి purely emotional id అయితే, చంద్రం సాక్షాత్కరించిన superego. రెండూ మనలోని కోణాలే. మన కోరికలకీ బాధ్యతలకీ, ఇష్టాలకీ కష్టాలకీ, easy కి right కి మధ్య అనుబంధం అంత తేలిగ్గా తేలదు. ఆ జుగల్బందీయే మానవ తత్వమేమో? <br /></p>sirish adityahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02692112394097540205noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5208559520594563111.post-40080343646621639672023-01-30T09:37:00.001+05:302023-01-30T17:39:06.302+05:30the somewhat documented life<p>The unexamined life is not worth living; Maybe, but is the unlived life worth examining?</p><p>I remember reading this pithy line a long time ago. </p><p>Is the undocumented life ever lived? That is the question confronting me now. Hours, days, weeks, months are slipping past, leaving no discernable mark, no decipherable clue. Ofcourse there are moments of levity, events attended, occasions celebrated, seemingly unsolvable irritations that eventually dissipate but the next day, the next week it's all a blur, afternoons that blend into each other, nights that disappear completely. The only way to reassure myself of their actuality are the material remnants- office emails, credit card bills, objects bought, notes made, and other people who confirm that whatever I think happened has indeed happened, we did it together. Ebert once wrote that one of the reasons people marry is to have a witness to their lives. That at the end of it there's someone we can look towards to placate ourselves that our life was real, that it wasn't all in our head. <br /></p><p>When I sometimes flick through the archives of this blog, I feel surprised that I'd once felt or thought that way. It's not as dramatic as in films, I don't feel it was written by a stranger whom I don't recognise now. I don't think I've changed so much, don't think most people change as radically (atleast that's one of the ideas I wanted to share in థియరీ & ప్రాక్టీస్). The surprise is more pleasant, more subtle, that I once spent all that thought and time thinking about that particular thing- a film, a book, an amateur philosiphical consideration. And that I wrangled with something, <i>something</i>, in the stream of my feelings and thoughts, trying to pin it down, trying to both keep up with and simultaneously comment on whatever it was that was going on in the jugalbandi between my head and external reality. </p><p>Writing is a physical process. It is as much an attempt to create a material artefact as sculpture. It is an attempt to hold the amorphous shapes in your head and before they disappear or distract you, to thrust them through this apparatus called words. It sounds like hunting in the dark. I suppose it is somewhat like that. To roam in the wilderness in the dark, hoping, praying to catch the wily, slippery beast, who's contours you don't know, and which'll disappear at the slightest noise. You can choose not to hunt though, to not put yourself through the wringer.</p><p>So why write? Or more generally, why document via blogposts, instagram photos, vacation stories we share at the slightest pretext, our highs and, only slightly less freqeuntly, our lows? Yes, we want to leave something behind when we're gone, we want to be remembered, we want to feel like we've lived good, eventful lives before we die. It seems to me that a large chunk of that desire is just ego massaging. There's also that aspect of celebrating our common humanity, connecting with others when we share. Then there are those among us who feel that documenting and confronting are ways of improving ourselves, to 'become a better version of myself tomorrow'. Beyond all this, I see another reason. </p><p>It is a spiritual practice. It feels awkward using the word especially since the bend I took away from all that a couple of years ago. Yet, I have no other way of describing it. Writing, conscious writing (usually blogging) and not drifting along with whatever comes to mind while journaling, for me is a process of genuine discovery. It is possibly the most conscious activity I do. When everything else ebbs away and it is me with whatever it is that is taking up the most space in my head. It is easily the best high I've ever had because I'm both in control but also willing to be guided, goaded into unventured territory. Yes, it is like hunting- to be purposeful and patient, walking in with the barest clue of what I might confront and come out with at the end, and also to be thrilled to the core at the prospect of toil and a well-earned reward.<br /></p><p>It is, in the best sense of the phrase, a labour of love. There are ofcourse many days, when I haven't written anything for months, when I wish writing was easier, or that I post something just because its been really long. I'm sure there are days when I gave into that temptation but I think those days, thankfully, are fewer. Days like today, when this post, for whatever its worth, came out of nowhere almost compensate for those frustrations. The world becomes beautiful and the heart flutters in the breeze. In a TED talk I heard a long time ago, Elizabeth Gilbert talks of a poet who would get the whiff of a poem while working in the fields and her ears would perk up with excitement. Before long the poem would thunder towards her like an incoming train and she'd run as fast she could to grab hold of a paper and pencil to jot it down. On some days, stories like those sound like banal platitudes. </p><p>Fortunately, today is not one of those days.<br /></p>sirish adityahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02692112394097540205noreply@blogger.com0