majaa aagaya

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.

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, అందాల ఆమని, మనసౌనె ఓ రాధ, శ్రీ కృష్ణాయను, తెలిసిరామచింతనతో, మనసా వాచా. 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 powerful versions. 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.

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).

I read two superb, and unexpectedly related, essays at work last Wednesday- One was Kathryn Schulz's piece on Carl Linnaeus in The New Yorker, and the other one was a long bookmarked essay in Daedalus called The Moral Economy of High-Tech Modernism. 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.

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 History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps 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 Vitanda 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).

Around the same time I discovered Prof. Amit Chaudhuri's super interesting talk called What Kind of Music Is This? 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.

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.

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.

Meheranna's new book is coming out పండగహో!

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.S: Reg the title: Man, Kaala!!