Certain young men1 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 monologue2 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.
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 Dyer6.
I haven't read Catcher in over a decade but I couldn't stop thinking about it while reading this book3. 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 usual4 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.
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 core5.
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?
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.
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.
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.
1I 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
2"It is extremely difficult to stay alert & attentive instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monolog inside your head" -DFW
3A large reason for that was Dr. Kesava Reddy mentioning it as a major influence in the foreword. I should probably stop reading forewords first
4I 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
5The 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
6Funny 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
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