علم میں ہی سرور ہے

Oh so this infatuation wears off too?!

After going on and on about how amazing fatherhood has been in the last couple of weeks, it would be disingenuous of me to not write about the transformation to a more prosaic reality; Especially when my long-time project of sorts has been to, as faithfully as possible, observe, transcribe, communicate, and celebrate this aspect of our being, this tempo and texture of our lives. Anyway, back to Noori. I still love holding her, love nuzzling my nose in her tummy, kissing her all over, inhaling her aroma, get a thrill when she (seems) to smile, love seeing her when she's milk-drunk. But ofcourse the interrupted sleeps add up, her crying is nerve-wracking and, even though poor thing hardly has bothered us except in refusing to latch, being the primary carers of an infant means you're always oncall so that means you can't relax as much as you used to. Having said that, it doesn't mean the love has disappeared- unless by love we only refer to the intense, heady feeling. Now it finds a place within my routine, when it slowly recedes from the foreground to seep into the deeper recesses of my being, when it, with all its connotations, becomes an integral part of my phase-transitioned reality.

For years and years I chased a high, the one incident that would catapult me to a state of ultimate clarity where there'd be no more doubts voiced from within. I now believe its a fool's errand. This is how it will be, change will happen- not just as dramatically as I'd assumed or hoped. Life is not art, it is not a dramatic story. It may contain them, or rather it may give you the material to create them, but its too rich, complex, nuanced, and long to be entirely contained in stories. This is a realisation that's taken atleast 20 years coming and to make sure I don't ossify ("My addiction is to ensure I don't have any addictions"), I must caveat it by saying that this is probably temporary too. Digression: My original title for అస్తిత్వం was అస్థిరం, and it was intended as a slightly farcical story reflecting the ever-changing "convictions" of a certain type of young man.

Another thing about Dharani. When Sravani was still pregnant, one day Amma said that according to some scriptures she'd read, the foetus spends the 9 months remembering its (mis)deeds from the previous janma and lamenting the fact that it has to take birth again and go through the travails of having a physical body. I remember how it disturbed Sravani and prompted her to later say to me, "My baby has done nothing wrong and is not suffering". Nonetheless seeing how helpless the infant is through these early days, when she is totally dependent on others for every one of her needs, when her only way to communicate hunger, discomfort, or a need to be cleaned are through crying which has be noticed and accurately parsed by clumsy adults with their inadvertently hurting hands, I couldn't help but feel sad that we were responsible for her suffering. I thought that she must be feeling like the experiences Hanif Kureishi has been describing about since his paralysis. Two nights ago though, when I was really sleepy and she refused to be calmed down, I felt the shadow of a helpless frustration threaten to grow inside me when Prof. Dawkin's selection of an Ernst Mayr essay distinguishing Essentialism vs Population Thinking popped into my head. My presumptions of her pain and suffering flow from the assumption that a healthy, articulate, independent adult human is the epitome of well-being and every other stage of our lives an aberration- as babies, children, sick people, old people. That is the essentialist fallacy (Isn't atma the ultimate essentialist position?). However, what if I adopt the lens of evolution and look at her? This little human, and countless others like her, will, within the next few years, learn physical co-ordination, language, social relationships, culture, science, and be able to play, imagine, create stories among many other things. Maybe she is not "suffering" right now, maybe its me as an adult who's projecting it onto a being which is currently incapable of comprehending anything like that. Not that there is no pain or discomfort; We should definitely do what we can to provide succour and nourishment. However to reach for lofty, abstract, gnostic pronouncements without working towards finding ways to test them is not going to help anyone. I'm not being facetious when I say that sometime when I'm with her, my feelings towards her feel akin to that of an chimpanzee with its cub. The physical transcends the rigid boundaries created by the mental .

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The other day Athaiya was laughingly telling someone that I compliment anyone's cooking the moment I take the first bite irrespective of how good it is. While a part of it is performance, part of it is genuine gratitude for the effort they've put into my nourishment, a large part of it is also philosophical. Going back to the essentialist framework, a big problem most of us have is that we have a good experience, be it food, sex, conversation, entertainment etc., and then we compare every subsequent experience to it. It hardly ever gets better (nothing more maliciously deceptive than memory) and we are disappointed when it doesn't match somehow. While I understand the inclination, and maybe we are entitled to seeking rapture (I can preemptively sense the jolt you got as you read that phrase), it also seems to be a permanently doomed enterprise. Not just that, by insisting on looking at things through existing categories, we risk filtering out the novel and thereby opportunities to update our ontologies.

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While I keep joking that I should maintain this blog so that my 4 faithful readers continue to know what goes on in my life, it is also the best way for me to take a breather, gather my thoughts, and test my hypotheses and claims. It keeps me, as the kids say it I suppose, and Kunni needs to tell me if this is indeed Gen Z lingo or if it dates me further, real. I was in a couple of brief conversations yesterday where the other person commented on grand themes ("తెలుగు భాషని కాపాడుకోవడం ఎలా", "చైనా పేరుకి కమ్యూనిస్ట్ దేశం కానీ వాళ్లంతా ఫక్తు క్యాపిటలిస్టులు"), and I felt agitated by not being able to pin down their vague pronouncements into more specific, testable hypotheses to that I could contest them. Which is ironical because it was not too long ago that I had the proclivity of making similar obtuse remarks myself in recursive, pithy, commodifiable theoretical statements. I am slightly wary of simplistic notions like "you're only thinking clearly if you're able to write clearly" but I see that they can act as good litmus tests. Other than that though, commiting these thoughts to a written form is beneficial in two ways: 1. Having a record of these utterances prevents me from turning into a చాదస్తపు old man who can't stop pontificating about how the young are failing 2. Even with the limitations of my characteristic muddled writing (thinking?), I'm painting an obvious target that can be questioned and pushed back against by anyone. Because one of the techniques of those who make pronouncements without corralling evidence - based on heresy, stereotypes or to simply provoke - is to deny they said what they said or point it to a different meaning. That ofcourse is detrimental to the specific conversation; In addition to that it does disservice to intellectual life in general. Ofcourse I have my blindspots, biases, ego-management techniques that will have to be pointed at by my interlocutors. All I can promise to do is attempt to her them out in good faith.

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Kishore Anna, Sarada garu and the girls came to see Dharani last weekend. I pointedly avoided the use of the word Noor around them. One reason was meekness. Amidst the "మనవాళ్ళు" type discussions going around, it felt inappropriate to make the secular statement. Another was my lack of credentials and knowledge to argue against Brahminism in his presence because while I'd be able to make an argument on the Modern World plane, I couldn't do it on the Sanatana Dharmam plane he, or for that matter even Payal Anna, would like to contest on. I do get emotional when someone questions the individual rights/ liberalism axioms, which I need to fix, and I was wary because Payal Anna identified that weakness and clobbered me a couple of times in arguments of the years. Most of all though, and it made me glad to realise this, I didn't want to turn my daughter into an arena for flippant, half-arsed, quasi-philosophical discussions. Despite the fact that I did name her a certain way precisely to make a statement, I did feel protective about her. I need to up my game though and prepare better going forward. 

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I recently read somewhere, and I paraphrase, that the thoughts arising in our heads are like blooming flowers. So writers who think they want to save a good one for later use are essentially letting it whither and die. It is, apparently, best to appreciate them and use them to weave our garlands as they blossom. Rest assured that more will come. It resonated with me. So in that spirit, I've decided to write a story that's been hovering around me for a year now, whose humming I've been hearing, sometimes faintly but also clearly, on the blog. Not to publish it once I've finished but to write it in public as and when we - the narratese (a neologism inspired by Prof. Steven Pinker's Mentalese) and I - find the space and the time to get together. I'm excited.

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Finally its been a very rewarding last few weeks in terms of reading and listening. Amit Varma's recent episodes with Manu Pillai and Sarbpreet Singh have been supremely fun and interesting, and I hope to get to those books soon. Venkat Rao has been in staggering form in the last few weeks and I've found the last three essays delightful. On top of that, his note 'He thought that he thought' gave me a useful tool to measure if I'm thinking outwards enough as it were- Attention, Not Self stated differently. I also finished George Megalogenis' informative Quarterly Essay Minority Report and enjoyed Tim Dunlop's review of it enough to write a comment on. Another long piece worth mentioning is Construction Physics' Energy Cheat Sheet. I also inadvertently started Shankar Nair's Translating Wisdom after stumbling upon it from a loosely related book list search, and have found the first few pages very interesting. Finally, I'm arriving at the home stretch of Francis Spufford's fascinating and gorgeously written Red Plenty about which I want to do a seperate post. In music, the solitary memorable discovery has been Jagjit Singh ji's Ye Aish-O-Tarab Ke Matwale. Finally, I haven't seen a film in over a month, Intinti Ramayanam was the last one and I enjoyed it, but hope to check out Megalopolis, A Complete Unknown, and Conclave in the next few weeks.

Oh and one last thing: my Urdu classes are going well. I'm able to read basic texts with a modicum of comfort but writing is at a more rudimentary stage. Also, Urdu seems more like English than a Sanskrit-based language in that there is only a crude correlation between sound and spelling, so it is imperative that one read a lot to write words correctly. That problem should be solved when I start reading more which I must do anyway because my corpus is very limited too.