किस किस को बताएंगे

మా అమ్మమ్మ ని ప్రేమించినట్టు నేనెవ్వర్నీ ప్రేమించలేదు. ప్రేమించలేనేమో. అమ్మ పట్ల అపారమైన ప్రేముంది, ఆప్యాయతుంది, గౌరవముంది, కృతజ్ఞతుంది. కానీ అమ్మమ్మ పట్ల హక్కుంది. తనని ఏదైనా అడగొచ్చు. అమ్మమ్మ ఇది కావాలి అంటే ఒక్కరోజనలేదు కుదరదు, చేతకావట్లేదు, ఇంకెప్పుడైనా అని. అది ఏ విషయమినా, ఎలాంటి పరిస్థితిలోనైనా అడిగిందిచ్చింది. అడగొద్దు అన్న స్పృహ కూడా పెద్ద లేదు. అరే తను ఇంకో మనిషి, తనకీ ఓపిక, మనస్సు తీరు, ఇష్టాయిష్టాలు ఉంటాయన్న ఆలోచనే లేదు. తనున్నది నాకొసమే, మరి నా అమ్మమ్మ ని నేనడుగుట్ల సంకోచమేంది భై. ప్రతి రాత్రి నిద్రపోయేముందు కళ్ళ ముందు మెదుల్తది. తనని ముట్టుకోగల్గితే ఎంత బాగుణ్ణు అనిపిస్తది. గట్టిగ ముద్దుపెట్టుకో గల్గితే ఎంత బాగుణ్ణు అనిపిస్తది. స్వర్గమనేదుంటే తన కాళ్ళ దగ్గర కూర్చొని ముద్దలు తినడమే.

నేను చావు గురించి గట్టిగనే ఆలోచిస్తా. నా చావు గురించి. వృద్ధాప్యం, రోగం, బాధ, శారీరిక హింస ఇదంతా సరె. చావు గురించి; అంటే ఓరోజు నేనుంట మరుసటి రోజుండ. అప్పుడు గుండెల దడ మొదలైతది. అదేదో నేను పొయ్నంక ఏమైతదని కాదు. నాలోని సైన్స్ పాఠకుడు చెప్తడు, అరే నువ్వే పొయినంక తర్వాత ఏమైతది అని చూడనీకె ఎవ్వడు మిగలడని. అది నేను నమ్ముత. భయమెందుకంటే ఈ ముప్ఫై ఏళ్ళల్ల నేను కొన్ని జ్ఞాపకాలు సంపాదించిన. కొన్ని దృష్యాలున్నై నా మనస్సులో. అవి నాకు ప్రియం, నాకే అపురూపం, నాకే అమూల్యం. నేను పొయ్నంక అవన్నీ మాయమైపోతాయని బాధ.

హనుమాన్ నగర్ ఇంటి మిద్దె మీద అమ్మమ్మ ముద్దలు తినిపిస్తూంటే అప్పుడే తాత స్కూల్ నుండి తిరిగొచ్చింది. సెవెన్త్ క్లాస్ ఆన్వల్ డే అయిపోయిన తర్వాత స్కూల్ నుండి చీకట్లో నేనూ అమ్మ బస్ స్టాప్ కి నడవడం. మా నాన్న తో వెళ్ళి కలోనియల్ కసిన్స్ కాసెట్ కొనుక్కోవడం. నాకు కాడుపులో అకస్మాత్తుగా నొప్పి వస్తే అమ్మమ్మ పరిగెత్తుకుంటూ దామొదర్ రెడ్డీ డాక్టర్ దగ్గరికి తీసుకువెళ్ళిన సందర్భం. చలికాలపు రాత్రుళ్ళు పది కాగానే తాత శాలువ సరిచేసుకుంటూ గేటుకి తాళం వేయడానికి వెళ్ళడం. జొహూర్ భాయ్ తో తాత ముందు కూర్చుంటే కారు వెనక సీట్లో నేను అమ్మమ్మ వొళ్ళో పడుకొని జమ్మికుంట నుండి తిరిగొచ్చిన సాయంత్రం. ఇలా ఇంకొన్నున్నాయి. అవన్నీ శూన్యంలో కలిసిపోతాయన్న బెంగ.

నా అమ్మమ్మ, నా తాత. ఎన్నడన్న వీళ్ళ గురించి ఒక కథ రాయలన్న కోరిక. కానీ అలా రాయలేకుండా పోతే ఇవన్నా మిగులుతాయని, అంతే.

మై బియర్

"He wants something better than he has. I want precisely what he has already.", అంటాడు ఎండ్ ఆఫ్ ద టూర్ లో డేవిడ్ లిప్స్కీ డేవిడ్ ఫాస్టర్ వాలెస్ ని ఉద్దేశిస్తు. మొన్న మెహెరన్నతో వాట్సాప్ చేస్తూ అకస్మాత్తుగా ఒక చిన్న రాంట్ వర్షం కురిపించాను. వన్ లైన్ సారాంశం - మీరు ఇంత అద్భుతమైన కళని ఎలా సృష్టిస్తారు, మీ మెథడ్ ఏంటి, మీ డీమన్స్ ఏవి మీరు వాటిని ఎలా జయిస్తారు. కానీ అంతర్లీనంగా అడగదలుచుకున్నది - నాకూ మీలా రాయలనుంది, భాషలో ఆలోచనలలో మీ స్థాయి చేరుకోవాలనుంది అండ్, మోస్ట్ ఇంపార్టెంట్లీ, మీరు పొందుతున్న లవ్ అండ్ అడ్మిరేషన్ నాకూ పొందాలనుంది, దారి చూపించు సామీ.

పాపం ఆయన ఓపిగ్గ సమాధానమిచ్చారు, ఆయనన్నట్టు ఇవే ప్రశ్నలు నేను 2-3 ఏళ్ళ క్రితం ఒకసారి వేసాను. 'ముక్కు' లో ఒక పాసేజ్ ని ఎక్సాంపుల్ గ తీసుకొని ఆయన ఇచ్చిన సమాధానంలో రెండు థ్రెడ్స్ కనబడ్డాయి నాకు -  నువ్వు చెప్పే విశేషంలో/వస్తువులో/విధానంలో కొంతైనా యునీక్నెస్ ఉంటుంది, అది చెరిష్ చేయటం నేర్చుకో; కళని యుటిలిటీ లెన్స్ తో చూడకు, అది చిక్కదు అని. మోటామోటాగ నాకది తెలుసు, ఐ అండర్స్టాండ్ దెట్ ఇంటలెక్చువల్లీ కానీ మనసుకి ఊరట కలగలేదే. నీ గుడికొచ్చి వరాలు కోరాను, ఇది కావాలి అది కావాలి అని, అవి నెరవేర్చు కోటానికి కావాల్సిన శక్తి నువ్విస్తానన్నా నాకొద్దు. అడిగిందియ్యి చాలు. చికాగ్గ అనిపించింది. తెలుసు నాకు, టీచ్ ఎ మాన్ టు ఫిష్ ప్రావర్బ్, తెలుసు నాకు ఆయన చెప్పిన దాంట్లో నిజం లేక పోలేదని, తెలుసు నాకు కష్టం లేకుండ ప్రతిఫలం కోరుతున్నానని, ఎక్కడో లోపల చిన్న గొంతు చెప్తూనే ఉంది - నీకావ్వాలసింది నువ్ ప్రోజెక్ట్ చేస్తున్నట్టు పాత్వే టు హిరోయిక్ మార్టర్డం కాదు అడ్మిరేషన్ అండ్ ప్లెషర్ అని. కావాల్సింది అలాంటిలాంటి ఆదరణ గౌరవం కాదు, మెహరన్న పట్ల నాకున్న ఆదరణ గౌరవం. ఆయనకి దాస్తోయెవ్స్కీ తోప్ ఏమో కానీ నాకు ఆయనే తోప్. కానీ ఆ ఆడ్మిరేషన్ కూడా ఎప్పుడూ ప్యూర్ కాదు, ఎందుకంటే ఇట్స టెయింటెడ్ బై జెలసీ, లాంగింగ్, ఎ స్ట్రేంజ్ మిక్స్ ఆఫ్ గ్రాటిట్యూడ్ అండ్ ఎన్వీ. నీల టీచరు, ముక్కు, ఒరాంగుటాన్, డిగ్రీ ఫ్రెండ్స్, చేదుపూలు చదివినప్పుడు ఏవో నాకే తెలీని నా అనుభవాల్ని ఆయన దొంగలించి రాసేసి పేరు కొట్టెసాడు అనే ఫీలింగ్. ముక్కైతే మళ్ళీ తీసి చదవాలంటే భయం - "ఇదొక అందమైన జ్ఞాపకంగా మిగిలి పోతుందని అది జరుగుతున్నప్పుడే అనిపించింది", "గుళ్ళో పూజారి, ఎదురుగా అర్చన పళ్ళెం దాంట్లో కొన్ని పూలు లాంటి కనబడని దృశ్యాలు మదిలో కదిలాయి" లాంటి వాక్యాలు ఎదురు పడితే కచ్చ వస్తుంది. అయినా నేను పారాఫ్రేస్ చేస్తున్నా కాబట్టి ఇంత చెప్పగా ఉన్నాయి ఈ వాక్యాలు కానీ ఒరిజినల్ చదివితే ఒళ్ళు జలదరిస్తుంది.

అయితే నా అదృష్టానికి ఆ మెసేజ్ రెండో సారి చదువుతూంటే ఒక విషయం తట్టింది. మెహెరన్న చెప్పిన ఫ్రీడం, ప్లెషర్, డిసైర్ టు ఎక్స్ప్రెస్ నాకు తెలియని అనుభూతులు కావు. బ్లాగ్ చేస్తున్నప్పుడు అలానే ఫీల్ అయ్యేవాణ్ణి. ఇమాజినరీ ఆడియన్స్ లేరు, డిసైర్ ఫర్ ఆకొలేడ్స్ లేవు, పనికొస్తుందా? ఎవరికోసం? లాంటి సందేహాలు లేవు. యే లిఖ్నే కా మన్ కర్రా మేర్కు, ఆకె పడెసో తుమ్హారీ మర్జీ నై తో ఖుదాఫిస్ అన్నట్టె ఉంటుండె. నాకు ఆయన రీచ్ అయిన ఎండ్స్ రీచ్ అయ్యేదుంది కాబట్టి ఆ మీన్స్ ఎమ్యులేట్ చేసేదుంది. కానీ అది చేసినంత మాత్రాన ఆ ఆర్ట్ క్రియేట్ చేయలేను కదా. ఆస్ బెనాల్, క్లీషేడ్ ఆస్ ఇట్ సౌండ్స్, ఐ హావ్ టు సింగ్ మై ట్రూత్. అంతకు మించి చేయగల్గింది ఏం లేదు. క్షణికమైన పబ్లిక్ ఆకొలేడ్స్ బెటరా, లేక క్షణికమైన ఖుల్కే ఖుద్కే లియే రాస్కునే సుకూన్ బెటరా అన్నది ప్రశ్న. ఇది చేస్తే పక్కాగా మొదటిది దక్కుతుంది అన్న గారెంటీ ఉంటే అదే చేస్తనేమో. కానీ అట్ల కాకపోవచ్చు, అయినా సెలౌట్/ ఫ్రాడ్ ఫీలింగ్ అపుడ్ గిన కల్గితే ఇగ బిస్కెట్. దానికన్న గిదే నయంతీ. అసూయ ఉంటది కానీ 'అథెంటిసిటీ' ఉన్నదన్న ఊరట భీ ఉంటది.

హరూకీ మురకామీ ఒక అనెక్డోట్ దొహ్రాయించి తన రాత గురించంటడు, "I’m sorry, but all I have is dark beer." అప్పుడప్పుడ్ అది కాపౌట్ అన్పిస్తది, అప్పుడప్పుడ్ నిజమే కదా, ఒక రచయిత వాడికొచ్చిన దానికన్న ఇంకేం ఆఫర్ చెయగల్తడు అన్పిస్తది. జిందగీల చాలా ఎపిఫనీస్ చూశ్న, గిదీ అంతే. అదొక షార్ట్-లివ్డ్ సుకూన్, మాస్చర్బేటరీ ఆర్గాసం లెక్క. అంతకి మించింది కావాలి, శాశ్వతంగా కావాలి. మొన్న వై బుద్ధిసం ఇస్ ట్రూ గురించి పాడ్కాస్ట్ ల వింటునప్పుడు అతనంటడు, మన బయలాజికల్ మెదళ్ళు ఇవాల్వ్ అయింది మనశ్శాంతి పొందనీకె కాదు, నెక్స్ట్ ఫుడ్, సెక్స్, స్టేటస్ చేస్ చేయనీకె అని. ఐ హియర్ యూ బ్రో అనుకున్న.

కొన్నేళ్ళ క్రితం వశిష్ఠ తన బ్లాగ్ ల నా పోస్ట్నొకదాన్ని ప్రస్తావిస్తూ అన్నడు నేను రాసిన పదాలు తను ఫీల్ అయ్యే విషయాలకి రూపానిచ్చినయని. అప్పుడు కాలౌట్ అయినందుకు జర ఎంబారసింగా అనిపించినా, ఇపుడు దాన్ని ఆబ్జెక్టివ్ గా చూస్తే కాస్త లోతుగ అర్థమైతాంది. నేను మెహెరన్న లా రాయలేను, వెస్ ఆండర్సన్ లా సినిమా తీయలేను - కాల్తది పర్ క్యా కరూ. జర ఉపశమనం ఇచ్చే ఆలోచనేందంటె మెహెరన్నకి, వెస్ కి కూడా ఏ దాస్తోయెవ్స్కీ నో, సాలింజర్ నో చూస్తే గట్లే అన్పిస్తదేమో. బికస్ వైల్ వాట్ దే క్రియేట్ మే ఫీల్ లైక్ మై థాట్స్ అండ్ ఫీలింగ్స్, దే ఆర్ ఆక్చువల్లీ దైర్స్. అండ్ నా బుర్రల అవి పర్ఫెక్ట్ కాబట్టి నేను చేసేదెది డెఫినెట్ గ ఆ స్థాయికి చేరుకోదు. నావి అనెందుకు అనిపిస్తున్నయంటే అవి ఒక షేర్డ్ హ్యుమన్ ఎక్స్పీరియన్స్ నే టాప్ చేస్తున్నాయి. రాగం లీలగా తెలిసిందే అయినా పాట వాళ్ళది. వాళ్ళ పాట మస్త్ నచ్చింది కాబట్టి షేక్ హాండ్ ఇస్త, గలె మిలాయిస్త, రోడ్ మీద నడుస్తున్నప్పుడు హం చేస్కుంట పోత. కానీ గదే పాట నేను రాయాలె, పాడాలె అంటె కుదరదేమో. మేరె ధున్ మె మెర్కొయీచ్ ఎక్ ఎక్ లఫ్జ్ జోడ్ కె, ధున్ సంభాల్తే హుయె గానా బనాన పడ్త. అబ్ ఖుద్ కా గానా కమ్సెకం ఖుద్ కో తు అచ్చ లగ్న నై. ఔర్ జిత్త భీ దునియా భర్ కే గానె సున్లో, ఉన్కో కిత్తా రట్ట మార్నా హై తో మార్లో, ఖుద్ కే గానే కా సుకూన్ తో అలగ్ హీ హై.    

a porous between : the outside and the inside

What a film watching spree it's been. Starting 05-Jun, Sunday, till 17-Jun, Friday, I watched 15 films in a theatre. 11 of those 15 as part of the Sydney Film Festival, which will hopefully shape up into a nice tradition. Here's a brief write-up on all those films in chronological order:

1. Major (Event Marion, Adelaide) - I walked into Major with a sense of dread. I thought I knew what was coming and while that may have influenced my experience of watching the movie, I believe I did try to give it a chance. I'll be succinct about my reservations- I don't particularly like to watch films about patriots especially in the current Indian political climate. From experience, I've come to believe that most of these mainstream films do less to investigate and enquire the phenomenon than to celebrate unthinkingly in jingiosm. Major wasn't as bad as, say, URI, but it nevertheless tried to isolate an individual from the army and celebrate his achievements which is a major (lol, accidental pun) problem in itself. The reason Indian Army is possibly the most celebrated and respected public institution in India is owed to the fact that the armymen are seen to be apolitical and willing to fight for a cause larger than their individual recognition/ ambition. When a particular individual is pulled out of the collective and glorified, notwithstanding the size of his achievements, it seems like an insult to the greater ideal. 

While this admittedly is a problem with the 'what' of the film, I would still have respected the effort if it had done a good job of portraying what it seemingly set out to do: portray the life of this particular military man. And in that respect too the film failed for two reasons: 1. The film turned the major into a standard Telugu film hero. We know all those attributes- confident, heroic, courageous, sacrificing, self-righteous etc. The problem with writing your hero like that is it becomes imperative to turn everyone around him into enthralled fans or nefarious scoundrels. It is hardly palatable in a normal Telugu hero, unbearable when he's talking down to superiors and colleagues in the army. 2. If Prakash Raj's speech in the climax is any indication, the film wanted "not to remember the way He died but to celebrate the way He lived". The film fails in this attempt too as extending the previous point, what you have is not an individual, with specific desires, talents, idiosyncracies and weaknesses, but a type who exists only to be admired and worshipped. The only bit in the entire movie that piqued by interest was a sequence in the Military Academy where he tries to answer what it means to be a soldier. But instead of working towards an answer, the filmmakers are content to provide a stock response and move on. With due respect to the real Major Sandeep Unnikrishnan, the film does no justice to his life and sacrifice.

2. Vikram (Event Marion, Adelaide) - Arambikalama. Now we're talking. When I got into an argument with Shoury about why RRR sucked, he told me that I ought to watch it like a pucca commercial film. Well, Vikram is one way to make one helluva mass film. To take on-board three juggernauts, Fahadh, Sethupathi and Kamal sir, and manage to come out with flying colours is no mean feat. And to do it with such high technical skill and panache is a terrific achievement. Ofcourse, I saw a lot of Nolan influences and Sravani mentioned Lokesh Kangaraj citing Tarantino as an influence (I suppose I now see it in the way Sethupathi's personaility and associates were designed) but it's also very good pucca South Indian masala.

SFF

 3. Uttama (State Theatre) - Amma was keen to watch this Spanish/ Quechua film and I'm glad I accompanied her. I've come to recognise the type - langurous, portraying a larger phenomenon by concentrating on local subjects, long static shots in a village, a tiff between the modern and the traditional, mostly local actors etc. - from my little art film experience but it worked. While the film's a loving portrayal, what deeply stuck were the two lead actors, apparently a real-life couple the director discovered while scouting for the film, who were breathtakingly gorgeous - especially the old lady Sisa. I couldn't stop thinking of Ammamma when looking at her.

4. The Forgiven (Hayden Orpheum) - The first film I booked in this year's festival the moment I saw it directed by John Michael McDonagh. How could I not after The Guard and Calvary. I had to take Sravani as well, telling her since years to watch Calvary ("It's set in Ireland, deals with a murder and has Mad-Eye Moody play the lead - I'm telling you girl, you'll love it"), and we had a 'great fockin time' (channeling my inner McDonagh character). It reminded us how much we seem to enjoy the locale, cultures and foods of the middle-east, and I especially liked the film for its scathing portrayal of the decadent (neo-)colonial elite. While I'd definitely rank his first two films higher, David Henninger is another gobsmackingly brilliant character. Ralph Fiennes is the man.

5. As in Heaven (Hayden Orpheum) - Another one of Amma's picks which I seem to have enjoyed more than she did. Shot in glorious 16mm, the film portrayed one important day in the life of a young girl in a Danish village in the 1880s. One of the film's themes, albeit minor, dealt with the changing social narratives and how science and rationality were slowly taking root in the minds of, atleast, the gentry. I've been thinking on and off about the notion of modernity, the European-kind post-Renaissance/Englightenment, for a couple of years now, thanks primarily to my ACT course, Dr. Velcheru Narayana Rao et al, Dr. Stephen Greenblatt, and reading about/ around Charles Darwin, and the film hinted at some of those preoccupations. I asked the director in the Q&A to shed some light on the larger society which led to one particular character try and make a rational argument but I wasn't satisfied with the answer probably because her film wasn't primary about those ideas.

6. The Music Room (The Art Gallery of New South Wales) - After dropping Amma off at her screeing of Commitment Hasan, I rushed to the Art Gallery to watch a film I was particularly excited about ever since I learnt SFF was doing a Satyajit Ray retrospective. The film was spellbinding in large sections and slightly irritating (owing mostly to the over-the-top acting which I suppose hasn't aged well) in some bits. If I'd seen the film 10, even 5, years ago, I guess Id've been completely enthralled. The story of a decadent zamindar, pawning jewellery to maintain a facade of opulence, would've been right up my alley. I think Ray does a phenomenal job of portraying both the melancholy and the inevitability of a passing age but I couldn't stop asking the question every few minutes - "Why am I watching a film about a character like this"? Yet, I couldn't turn away. I, of all people, don't want to argue that just because something is ugly, or repugnant, a film shouldn't be made about it. If anything, it only highlights the level of Ray's crasftsmanship. And what music, what music, by Ustad Vilayat Khan. I was transported.

7. All that breathes (Event George Street) - I read about all that breathes many months ago in, I think, David Ehrlich's column and was intrigued by it. I'm generally a sucker for anything resembling an Indian ethnographic study and the story of a pair of muslim brothers, Saud and Nadeem, working out of their home clinic in Delhi treating and saving birds seemed too fascinating to be missed. Add to that, when I saw clips from the director Shounak Sen's previous film, Cities of Sleep, I was reminded, for some unclear reason, of Amit Dutta's work and I really wanted to watch the film. So it was a no brainer to book tickets when it showed up in the SFF catalog and the film truly lived upto its hype. We later learned, as part of the Q&A with Nadeem, that it took over 3 years to shoot the film. True to its title, the subject of the film isn't limited to the kites or the clinic, but all living thing that are adapting and trying to survive in the new urban spaces which have encroached on and destroyed traditional wildlands. Its a stunning technical achievement and showed me what the word Anthropocene truly entrails.

"Aasman se panchi tapak rahe hain aur logon ko lagta hain ki sab kuch normal hain" -Mohammad Saud

Also, we spotted Nadeem multiple times in the next few days in one or another of SFF venues and Sravani was keen to ask him to join us for dinner but I thought it would've been a bit too much.

8. Fire of Love (State Theatre) - Rama pointed me to this film when I'd met him for lunch a few weeks ago, and he was so intrigued by the subject that he was planning to come down from Woollongong (where he was set to go for a couple of weeks to babysit a friend's pet rabbit) just to watch it. So I checked it out and both Sravani and I liked the trailer enough to watch it. I liked it but Sravani loved it, the story of a volcanologist couple who worked, and eventually died, together on/ around active volcanoes. Since a large part of  film was put together from the footage they'd shot in the 70s and 80s, the film had that lovely home video aesthetic.

9. The Phantom of the Open (Hayden Orpheum) - One of those feel-good true-but-hardly-believeable stories of individuals who take-on-the-system-with-pluck-and-ingenuity that make for good telefilms to be telecast on weekday afternoons, the movie was funny in parts. The screening was filled with many grey heads, probably from British ancestry, who had a great time.

10. Godland (State Theatre) - A fairly stereotypical European art film dealing topics like colonisation, proselytisation, god's silence, monotheism vs nature worship, Godland nonetheless is an interesting and immersive film. 

(to be continued)

అమ్మమ్మ నువ్వంటె నాక్ మస్త్ ప్రేమ

I miss Ammamma, I miss her terribly. There's ofcourse sadness that she's passed away and that I wasn't there. That she had to suffer so much towards the end. But that feeling isn't too big. What I miss way more is being with her. I miss knowing that if I walk to the front room of the Dilsukh Nagar house, she'd be lying down on the bed watching a Tamil serial. And that I can climb in next to her, nudging her a little to make space for myself, and hug her and go to sleep. Which I did until even the last time I was in India. I miss the smell of coconut oil in her hair, I miss her shuffling walk around the house, I miss her coming to the computer room to bring me tea and leaving it on my desk, without taking a glance at the computer. 

She simply didn't ask what you were doing, that nosy inquisitiveness wasn't in her character. Ofcourse she was curious and she'd ask me about girls I was speaking with on the phone, and people she didn't talk to but wanted to know about. But she was very wary of transgressing, of crossing the line in case a person snapped at her and bluntly told her to mind her business. I think she learnt that lesson the hard way, the bitter way.

I miss her shouts of 'Shyamalaa' and 'Chinnaa' and 'Maheshwari'. I can clearly see the పచ్చబొట్టు of the three dots next to her left thumb, can see the single red glass bangle she wore for most of her later years after Thatha passed away. I miss the way her body would convulse with laughter when someone fell down and the way she'd try to stop it by pressing her palm hard against her mouth; I haven't seen another person who was so amused by a person falling. I can clearly see her gulping down the contents of a coke bottle, throwing it away and burping loudly and saying, "హమ్మ, తృప్తైంది". I can see the vitiligo marks on her forehead and on her knees. 

I remember that evening so clearly: I was in Panineeya in class 5 and I think I had a special class till late or something. So she got me food in her famous green butta and I remember her feeding me పెరుగన్నం with తోటకూర ఫ్రై while I fooled around by hanging to a window sill yapping about something. I haven't seen it but I can imagine the way she must've run down to the house below in Delhi the morning Amma got her fits and bang on the door loudly to fetch help. I miss tucking the loose ends of her saree while she was sweeping the ప్రాంగణం in the morning. I miss taking her to Garden Vareli and how she'd finish her shopping in 5 mins by choosing 3-4 sarees. That's it, no hesitations, no second thoughts, no "I wish I'd picked that one instead" after coming home. And how she, Amma and I would then go to Bata and she wouldn't like anything because they didn't stock Gliders anymore. Then we'd go to Minerva or Chutneys or Dwaraka and she'd order Masala Dosa and Vada and Idly and after polishing everything off and gulping down the last of the sambar say contentedly, "శుభ్భరంగ తినేసా.. హాపీ". 

I just remembered those chocolate donut type things she made a habit of getting me from the cafe opposite Secunderabad Vinayaka Temple to which she went on Mondays for years. It was a routine she cherished: Send Thatha off to school, get ready, walk to Chaitanyapuri bus stop, get into 90D or 86N or occassionally 107D, get down at Secunderabad station, pray in the temple, do ప్రదక్షణ, sit there and eat ప్రసాదం, and then walk around the temple and buy maybe రాగిపళ్ళు or చెరుకు or గేగులు. Then go to the cafe to get my donut and then to Swathi for her full meals. I think she looked forward to those Sundays because she was totally free for that one పూట. I don't think I've known a person who wanted to be as free, as independent as her. 

I can clearly hear తార అమ్మమ్మ's booming voice, calling out from the gate, "వదినె!". My incredible grandmother gave me ten rupees every Monday after coming home from school for years so that I could wash my face, change my clothes and rush to Pani Puri uncle to eat cutlet for 3 rupees and 21 gapchups for 7 rupees. Sometimes when I'd get gapchup parcel for Amma and Amma'd ask her to eat a few and she'd eat 3-4 and say, "చాలు చాలు".

It's eerie how most of my memories are from when I was young. Is it because the older I grew, the less important she became to me? Possibly. As an idea, as my అమ్మమ్మ, she was extremely important. I adored her though not as much as Id've liked in the last few years. As a person, as a full fledged entity she didn't have as much space in my everyday life and thoughts as she did earlier. To a large extent that's because the circle of my own life increased and new experiences and new people became more important. Certainly there was also the aspect of her becoming more aloof, more alone after తాత's passing. I found it harder and harder to engage her in long conversations because she'd want to go back to her TV maybe because she thought I was going to come and go whereas TV was her true companion. 

Our (తాత-అమ్మమ్మ-నేను) Bombay-Pune-Zaheerabad-Hyderabad bumpy bus journey is deeply etched into my memory. I remember the innumerable times she'd try to protect me from తాత or మోనీమామ's scoldings. I remember taking money from her డబ్బుల కాన్. Amma just reminded me of the time she took me to watch Titanic, that's how cool she was. She is. I'm grateful to Purnima garu for recording her voice (her opinion of Tejo-Tungabhadra) and putting it up on Pustakam. 

I was just telling Amma that yeah ofcourse I'm sad that she had to suffer and had to endure such pain especially in the last few months but what I remember now is not the pain nor the suffering nor the fights we had about her TV addiction nor my insistence that we move from the Dilsukh Nagar house to an apartment. They're just present hazily in my head. It's all those beautiful memories I have of her that are gushing out. Like the time in 2019 when I took her for her eye checkup after the cataract operation and we stopped for lunch in Chutney's Kothapet. I think we had to wait for a long time for our order and she became irritable and wanted to leave, but when the food finally arrived I think she enjoyed it. I'll always miss her పూరి ఆలుగడ్డ సాగు and her బగార and రొట్టె కారం బెండకాయి కూర and so much more, but I'll also remember that with immense fondness and love. When I was in school, I'd begrudge classmates who'd go to their నానమ్మ/ అమ్మమ్మ ఊరు for summer holidays. Little did I know that for me everyday was a summer holiday because of అమ్మమ్మ తాత and the దిల్ ష్నార్ ఇల్లు. 

అమ్మ ఇప్పుడె యాద్ చేషినట్టు అమ్మమ్మ నన్ను వాళ్ళ నాయన అనేది. అన్నంక బెదిరిస్తుండె, "చచ్చి నీ కడుపున పుట్టి నిన్ను సాధిస్త బిడ్డ" అని. ఆ ధంకీ మాత్రం మస్త్ ఖుషీగ ఇస్తుండె. నా వరకు నువ్ నాక్ బెష్ట్ అమ్మమ్మ. మస్త్ మిస్ జేస్తున్న నిన్ను. సారీ దూరం పోయినందుకు. ఇందాకట్సంది నువ్వు నా జుట్టు పీక్కుంట తలకాయకి నూనె పెడ్తున్నట్టు తోస్తాంది, "మొత్తం ఎండిపాయె తల్కాయ్" అనుకుంట. నీ మామిడికాయ్ గీకుడు పచ్చడి యాద్కొస్తాంది, తెల్ల మురుకు పచ్చి మజ్జిగ, మనం కోఠీకి పోయి తెచ్చుకున్న చాయ్ కప్పు, సాయి బాబ గుడి దగ్గర టైలర్ షాప్ ల నువ్ నాకు కుట్పించిన అంగి, మధ్యానాలు కాల్చిన పల్లీల్ తినుకుంట హనుమాన్ నగర్ ఇంటి గురించి మనం పెట్టిన ముచ్చట, నువ్వు ఒద్దొద్దంటున్న నేను నీ కాళ్ళకి టైగర్ బాం రాసి వత్తినప్పుడు నువ్ పడ్డ సుకూన్.. ఇలా ఎన్నో ఎన్నెన్నో జ్ఞాపకాలు. బెజార్గుంది కానీ గివన్నీ తల్చుకుంటాంటే మంచిగ కూడ ఉంది.

I love you ammamma and I'm glad you knew it.

దేవుడంకుల్ ఇప్పుడిక్కడుంటలేడు

A poem I wrote a couple of months ago after seeing the horrific image in The Guardian of a fish that seemed to have choked on plastic debris. I sent it to Purnima garu and Rohith, and they thought it was good enough to be sent for publication. I then sent it to Meheranna, with some trepidation, who initially liked it but a few weeks later said it needed to be improved for publication in Andhra Jyothy. By then I was able to see it more objectively and couldn't convince myself that it was good enough to warrant publication, an idea I was enamoured by earlier. 

So here it is. Oh, and one more thing: The first line was my first title for the post that later became the video essay The Godless Universe. It was renamed as earthbound because I was so disappointed with the patchy post that I didn't want to waste the inspired title. Funny.

--

దేవుడంకుల్ ఇప్పుడిక్కడుంటలేడు

ఎటు పోయిండో తెల్వది

ఇగో ఈ నామం గాళ్ళకి అపజెప్పిండట
ఏమో ఎవరో తెల్వది మాకు

కేరళలో ఎవడో లుచ్చగాడు పాపం
ఏనుక్కి బాంబు తినబెట్టిండట
అటు గిన పోయిండేమో

లేక సముద్రంల చిన్న చిన్న చేపల్
ప్లాస్టిక్ ముక్కల్ తిని అరగక సస్తున్నయట
వాటిని సూడబోయిండేమో
మరి తెల్వది మాకేం చెప్పలె

పక్షుల్ గిన ఆసిడ్ బావుల నీళ్ళు తాగి
ఉడికి ఉడుకి సస్తున్నయట
ఆస్ట్రేలియాల అడవుల్
తగలబడుతున్నైయట

ఆర్క్టిక్ ల మంచు ఎలుగుబంట్లు
నిల్వజాగా లేక మునిగి సస్తున్నయట
ఆడేడికన్న పోయిండేమో మరి
ఏం చెప్పలె మాకు

ఏంది ఎప్పుడొస్తడంటవా?
అసలొస్తడంటవా?
అయినా ఆడొచ్చేదాక మనముంటమా ఏంది
మనమే పోం
ఈడ ఏం మిగల్చం
రానీ వాపస్ ఆడ్ని, ఏం పీక్తడొచ్చి

ఇప్పుడ్గవన్నీ ఎందుక్ రా
దా, పక్కకూర్సో
ప్రపంచం తగలబడతా ఉంది
సమ్మగ, వెచ్చగ సలి కాచుకుందం

దేవుడంకుల్ ఇప్పుడిక్కడుంటలేడు
ఎటు పోయిండో తెల్వది మరి

living on the outside

I've tried a few times over the years to try and post more polished work here on the blog. I don't think it has happened even once. Last night I was talking to Amma about wanting to blog of my experience of the Sydney Film Festival (which I'll write about subsequently) and she told me to try and write in a simpler, more accessible form. While I told her I'd try, I also knew that it was unlikely that it'd happen. Primarily, it is because of a problem I have with redrafts. Many of the writing tips I've read stress the importance of editing and redrafting. I understand its importance, I just can't get myself to do it. Probably because I'm too lazy but I'm reluctant to admit that's a big factor here. It seems to be about two different things:

1. Almost none of what I express here is original or beautiful or important or any of the like. I don't mean it with false humility or embarrassment. I feel it in my bones, it is evident to me. The blog is, and has been, a place for me to regularly keep posting on the thoughts and experiences I've had. It is a journal. But then why not just write in a personal diary? I've wrestled with this question quite a bit and have tried writing 'first drafts' in a notebook or a Google Doc to later edit and put up here. That never happens because the piece doesn't seem worthy enough on a second look. Also, if I seem to go off on flights of fancy here, what I write in my notebooks goes beyond the stratosphere. They're just words following words that, more often than not, create a swirl of incoherence. While I, more or less, write the blog for myself, I'm aware that this is a public forum and I must try and be a little more thoughtful. It is the possibility of an audience, of another individual going through this that keeps me conscious enough to try and make sense. By way of analogy, if the notebook is my bedroom, where anything goes and there's no audience, writing here is like sitting in a friend's house after dinner and making conversation. It is not a big social setting for me to feel the expanse of my ignorance and futility acutely but a place I'm comfortable in that also demands a certain social decorum. Then why not make it more accessible like Amma says? That brings it to my second point.

2. Part of it is arrogance, a (misplaced) sense of individuality; A desire to leave behind my most 'authentic' being as if anyone cared. Part of it is the fear of requiring to say something more useful if I expect an audience to pay attention; This way I can say, defensively, that these are idiosyncratic ramblings and I didn't ask for a readership. Part of it is the incredibly stupid desire to preserve anything that comes out of my head because of its 'uniqueness'. Part of it are the mottos from half-remembered writing manifestos I used to read years ago- that Form is Content, that it is a writer's duty to expand the realm of what's possible and acceptable etc. Ultimately though, this blog is my first version of my history. And in that sense, it is an attempt to capture as closely as possible what's going on inside me when I'm writing it. I both care and not care about a readership. I care because I don't want to be trapped in my solipsism, become a madman who's intelligible only to himself. I sometimes do feel happy when I get appreciation for something I've written (including from a surprised future me). And I don't care because I don't think I know enough to address a public, have enough 'content' in me to 'communicate effectively' to others, I don't want to see myself as a sellout especially with how I write. I don't care too much about an audience because I live in a Post-Modern world where the notion of the self has grown so large that people are only thinking of their stories no matter who's they are reading. And in such a world, the notion of writing for an audience disintegrates. Occassionally, I convince myself that what I'm doing here is like a Platonic Dialogue, an act of thinking in public. If anything of value can be gleaned off all this, it is not at the level of the post but at the level of the entire blog. I've tried to explore where a thought comes from and what shapes it takes before leaving my orbit.

I've long dreamt of being a writer and filmmaker. It's my greatest fantasy. Over the years, I've learned that I don't have the talent nor the perseverance to achieve it. Which is fine. Truth be told I was enamoured more by the glamour and celebrity of those identities than the craft and the art themselves. I can't seem to redraft and tinker and improve because I'm no writer. I'm a blogger and that is the process I enjoy, that I think about regularly, that I am happy about. My talent, whatever little I may possess, is not a writerly intelligence but articulation. I'd like to believe I have the ability to think fairly comfortably in words and be able to transcribe them unadulterated. It is the art of conversation, especially with the self, that comes naturally to me. And I'm more than happy to cherish that gift and explore the possibilities it offers. 

The blog like is a little space in a corner in Lamakaan where I'm having a conversation with myself. And if a few people who're going past want to stop and listen in for a few minutes, I'm happy with that. If not, then atleast it gives me a chance to perform in a public space outside of the confines of my own head, almost like an improv actor on stage, and for those minutes and hours, I'm a happy man. I'm content with that arrangement. 

--

I seem to have a thing for seminars and festivals. They give me immense joy. Specifically if they're offline, in the real world. I feel like a kid in numaish. Traversing that physical environment among groups of people, the excitement at the prospect of learning and experiencing something new, and a sense of community (albeit briefly) make me feel extremely alive and invigorated. I'll try to write brief notes on the 9 films I saw, in chronological order, as part of SFF 2021.

1. Memoria - There is a long scene in the first third of the film which I think is filmmaking of the highest order. The Tilda Swinton character is talking with a sound engineer, trying to get him to recreate the deep, booming sound she's been hearing. Weerasethakul handles it with such assured steadiness that I was drawn in so completely into the act of listening to a series of sounds, noticing subtle variations and trying to match it with the original sound. It is an incredible scene. 

I really enjoyed the film despite dozing off for a couple of minutes during its extremely slow third act. It brought a certain calmness to my mind and pushed me to observe and collaborate with the happenings on the screen. Equally importantly, I think it also helped me learn how to watch 'art' cinema. I'd always assumed that when you're deeply involved in a film, you forget the passage of time. Memoria forced me to pass consciously through the thick, viscous texture of time, almost like passing through a wall of jelly. And I felt refreshed at the end of it. There is only one way I can rationalise the enjoyment of Slow Cinema: To live in the modern world is to compulsively seek entertainment and distraction. It is hard to be truly, deeply, relaxingly bored because your smartphone keeps interrupting it. The antidote to intrusive cinema then is involving cinema. And watching Memoria taught me that.

2. The Drover's Wife The Legend of Molly Johnson - I picked this film because it seemed to deal with Australia's colonial past. It wasn't a bad film but I don't think I can recommend it. It was also the most mainstream of the films I saw in the festival. 

3. Mandabi - This 1968 Senegalese film was a conscious choice. Most of the films I generally watch are American, European or Indian, and a film festival seemed like the right place to expand my horizons and try something I won't watch otherwise. I enjoyed the film, mostly its bright, colourful images and Makhouredia Gueye's performance in the lead role. I have immense affection for a certain kind of tropic, sunny landscape (especially Caribbean) and Mandabi had many shots, particularly because they weren't self-consciously reaching out to me for compliments, that cheered me up.

4. Quo Vadis, Aida? - Sravani really wanted to watch this film after she discovered it was about the Srebrenica Massacre which she'd read a bit about a few months ago. I think its an important film, an interesting film and Jasna Duricic was incredible in the lead role. I also have a thing for erstwhile Soviet countries (maybe that also explains my abstract affection for townships) and the physical structures in the film were captivating.

5. Cow - Andreas Arnold's non-narrative documentary on Luma, a cow somewhere in a dairy farm in Britain, was the dare of the festival for me. A large portion of the film (a bit of the time is spent with one of her calves) is either focused on Luma or show us her subjective gaze with no context or voiceover and not even background music in the first half. It was a really good experience, including the queasiness I felt multiple times because of the jerky, intrusive camera angles. Setting aside its political and economic messages, which interestingly the film doesn't tell you and we fill in from our knowledge of news reports, what the film does wonderfully well is not let you avert your gaze away from another being. It forces you to see Luma and to imagine what she must be thinking and feeling. Apart from a shot of the fireworks, that in my opinion was misplaced, the film is a great achievement for keeping you engrossed in the life of a cow for 90 minutes.

6. Where is the friend's house? - Probably my favourite film of the festival. This 1987 Abbas Kiarostami film, my first time actually watching a Kiarostami, is gold. And what a find Babak Ahmadpour is! An incredible film and one I think every kid should be shown. The fable-like quality of the film, its gentle rhythms, the gorgeous score, the characters - just the pleasure of being in the cinema with a couple of hundred others, laughing and gasping together, entranced by the film while also being aware that you're sharing with experience with others, and feeling grateful for the innocence and sense of justice that children seem to possess. The last shot is a work of genius and probably one of the very few instances in my experience as an audience where I felt the entire theatre gasp, cheer and applaud instantaneously.

7. Drive my car - A film I picked because it was based on a Haruki Murakami story. I really enjoyed the film. I thought Ryusuke Hamaguchi was able to capture the psychosexual texture of Murakami's stories really well, especially in the long prologue. Even now, thinking of Oto's scenes is giving me a tingling pleasure. Later the film expanded into a lot more and went places far and wide. I especially loved the segment with the mute artist. While coming out, I felt like having taken a long, fruitful journey. We live our little lives, with our little social circles and assume that that is what the world is like. Good journeys and artworks bring us out of that self-confined space and give us a glimpse of the much, much larger world that we are a part of. And I felt that at the end of this film. 

8. River - Easily the worst film of the list. Probably one of the worst films I've seen in a while. Being the self-proclaimed climate change conscious liberal signaller that I am, it was a no brainer to watch this film that's ostensibly about rivers and how they're being impacted by our actions. The decision was made even easier when I learned that it was written by Robert Macfarlane and narrated by William Defoe. What a waste it was. I came out of the theatre not having learnt one new thing (except one fact about sediments), not felt one genuine emotion (except that of intense irritation) and was left underwhelmed by every one of those desperate-to-awe images. Not one memorable image in a film about nature. The bland, postcardish aesthetic of the images worked only to reinforce my belief that it is not the size or the scale of the spectacle that makes things great or epic but the breadth of the ideas that are being conveyed. Macfarlane's words were so flat, so devoid of feeling, so unimaginative that all of Defoe's pregnant pauses only underscored their triviality. 

9. The Hand of God - The first Paolo Sorrentino film I saw was The Great Beauty in the 2013 edition of the Chennai Film Festival. It was probably the best film I saw there. Most of my favourite artists are my favourites because they seem to be creating art that no one else is. It isn't that they are the best at something; It is that no one else can even comprehend that 'something'. Sorrentino's incredible ability to portray the effervescence of deeply moving aesthetic experience and the melancholy accompanying it is on show again in The Hand of God. This coming-of-age is less a portrayal of that phase in real-time than a middle-aged man's recollections of his last childhood summer with all the accompanying golden hues and deep, heartful laughs. The glorious visuals brought to mind our Italy trip and how the nature of light itself seemed to be so different, so sensuous there.

I've had a great, great ten days, and thanks to Sravani's encouragement watched a couple more films than planned, and I'm still surprised at the unalloyed pleasure I feel at having gone to the theatre and watched so many films. Ah, how fortunate it is to be able to watch, feel, think and discuss art cinema.

నాదీ భారతీయ సంస్కృతే

 My thoughts and counter-arguments to these set of Garikapati Narasimha Rao's video clips. For context, please watch the clips before reading.

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1. "..పంజాబీ వరకు పర్లేదండి.. అది భారతీయ సంస్కృతి.. పైగా నన్నడిగితే దాంట్లో కవరేజ్ ఎక్కువ.."
ఎవరు చెప్పేది భారతీయ సంస్కృతి? దేశంలో ఎన్నో కోట్లమంది ఆడవాళ్ళు చీర, పరికిణీ, పంజాబీ సూటు వేసుకోరు. వాళ్ళంతా భారతీయులు కానట్టా? ఒక ట్రెడిషన్ ఫాలో ఐతే భారతీయులౌతారా, లేక భారతీయులు చేసేది కొన్నాళ్ళకు ట్రెడిషన్ అవుతుందా? కట్టు, బొట్టు, ఆహార వ్యవహారాలు మొ|| సమాజంలో ఏర్పడటానికి, ఒక వ్యక్తి అలవర్చుకోటానికి ఎన్నో కారణాలుంటాయి. మరి అలాంటప్పుడు ఒక గిరిగీసి ఇది భారతీయత, ఇది కాదు అని చెప్పటం ఎలా సాధ్యమౌతుంది? మీరు చెప్పే పంజాబీ సూటు మరి ఇండియాలో పుట్టలేదే. అది మిడిల్-ఈస్ట్ నుండి వచ్చి ఇవాల్వ్ అయింది. అసలా మాటాకొస్తే 1940ల దాకా కేరళలో అప్పర్-కాస్ట్ ఆడవాళ్ళు బ్లౌజులు వేసుకోక పోయేవాళ్ళు. మరి వాళ్ళది కాదా భారతీయ సంస్కృతి? అయినా జీన్సు పాంట్లు వేసుకునే వాళ్ళకే/ వాళ్ళవల్లే రేపులు జరుగుతాయంటే, ప్రతి వెస్టర్న్ కంట్రీలో 24 గంటలు రేపులే జరగాలే? ఎందుకంటే అక్కడి ఆడవాళ్ళు అవే వేసుకుంటారు కనుక.

2. "..అమ్మాయిలకి చెబుతున్నా తండ్రి స్థానంలో చెప్పాలి కాబట్టి.."
వద్దు సార్, మీరు తండ్రి స్థానంలో కూర్చొని చెప్పకండి. మన గొడవంతా ఆడవాళ్ళని తల్లులుగానో, బిడ్డలగానో, చెల్లెళ్ళగానో ఒక straitjacketలో ఉంచటం. అప్పుడు వాళ్ళకి మనుషులుగా ఏజెన్సీ, లిబర్టీ ఇవ్వాల్సిన అవసరం లేకుండా. సాటి మనిషిగా గుర్తించి మంచి చెడు మాట్లాడండి, చర్చించండి, తెలుసుకోండి. లేదు మీకు చెప్పే స్థానంలో కూర్చోవటమే ఇష్టమంటే అబ్బాయిలకి చెప్పండి, "మీరు పద్ధతిగా ఉండండి, అమ్మాయిలని గౌరవించండి, అవతలి మనిషిని objectify చేయకండి", అని చెప్పండి.

3. "..అందమైన అవయవాలు పొందిగ్గా కనబడుతూంటే కుర్రాడెవడైనా ఊరుకోగలడా అండి"
మీరు ఆ స్థానం లో కూర్చొని ఇంత అసహ్యంగా మాట్లాడుతున్నారు కాబట్టి మీకు అర్థం అయ్యే పరిభాష వాడే ప్రయత్నం చేస్తాను: మీరు కొత్త కారు కొనుక్కొని ముందుగా పూజ చేయించటానికి గుడికెళ్ళారు. అక్కడ కారుని గుడి బైట పెట్టి అర్చన టికెట్టు కొనుక్కోటనికి లోపలికెళ్ళారు. అసలే చిన్న రోడ్డు, మీ పెద్ద కారు సందుని బ్లాక్ చేస్తోంది. ఆ రద్దీలో ఓ కుర్రాడు బైకు మీద అజాగ్రత్తగా వెళుతూ మీ కారుని వెనక నుండి గుద్దేసాడు. పరిగెత్తుకుంటూ బైటికిచ్చొన మీరు వాడిని పట్టుకొని వాయించేస్తారా లేక అయ్యో అసలు నేను కారు కొనటం వల్లనే కదా ఇంత ఉపద్రవం వచ్చింది, తప్పు నాదే అని సరిపెట్టుకుంటారా?

4. "..అది వాడి హక్కు.."
నాకు నచ్చినట్టు నేను ఉండటం నా హక్కు. వాడికి నచ్చినట్టు వాడు ఉండటం వాడి హక్కు. అంతే కాని నేను నా పాటికి రోడ్డుమీద వెళుతూ ఉంటే హరాస్ చేయటం, సెక్ష్వల్ అబ్యూస్ చేయటం వాడి హక్కు కాదు. నేను ఒకలా ఉంటే వాడు వాడి ఊహల్ని తీసుకెళ్ళి బాత్రూంలో ఏం చేసుకుంటాడు అనేది వాడి హక్కు. కానీ సమాజంలో నాతో అసభ్యంగా ప్రవర్తించే హక్కు వాడికి లేదు. కానీ వాడు హక్కులా ఎందుకు ఫీల్ అవుతాడు అంటే అది మీలాంటి వాళ్ళ వల్లే. అమ్మాయి ఒకలా ఉండాలి, అబ్బాయి ఎలా అయిన ఉండొచ్చు అని తీర్మానించి ఇలా టీ.వీల్లో చెప్పే మీలాంటి వాళ్ళవల్లే.

5. "..ఖాళీలు కనబడేలా.. ఇల్లాళ్ళండి వీళ్ళ దుంపతెగ.."
మరి అవే రూల్స్ మొగవాళ్ళకి అప్లై కావా? మీ ఏజ్ అంకుల్స్ అంతా రోడ్ల మీద మడిచిన లుంగీలు, కట్ బనీన్లతో తిరగరా? అయినా ఇల్లాళ్ళు సరిగ్గా లెరనే అనుకుందాం.. మీకూ పెళ్ళైంది కదా, మరి మీరెందుకు ఆ దృష్టి తో చూస్తున్నారు  వేరే ఆడవాళ్ళని?

6. "..ఎవరికీ ప్రదర్శనలు?"
నిజం ఒప్పుకోవాలంటే నేను ఇదే ఆలోచించే వాడిని, ఎందుకు చేయటం ఎక్స్పోసింగ్ అని. అయితే రెండు విషయాలు 1. ఎవడు నిర్దేశిస్తాడు ఏది ఎక్స్పోసింగ్ అని? తాలిబాన్ లకు బుర్కా కాకుండా ఇంకేదైనా ఎక్స్పోసింగే? రాజస్థాన్ లో పైకొంగు లేకపోతే అది ఎక్స్పోసింగ్. ఎవరు నిర్దేశించాలి? అదలా ఉంచితే మొగవాళ్ళ ఎక్స్పోసింగ్ కూడా ఆపమని మీరు చెప్తారా? 2. పోనీ ఒక అమ్మాయికి ఎక్స్పోసింగ్ చేయలనే కోరికే ఉందనుకో. అయితే ఏమైన చేయొచ్చా? ఇంకో ఉపమానం: మీరు రేపు రోడ్డు మీద పోతున్నారు, ఎవరో వెనక నుండి వచ్చి నెత్తి మీద ఠపీమని కొట్టాడు. ఎందుకురా కొట్టావ్ అని ఆడిగితే నువ్వు హెల్మెట్ పెట్టుకోని తిరగవోయ్ అని సమాధానమిస్తే ఊరుకుంటారా?

7. "..వాడు కుర్రాడు.. శ్రీరామ చంద్రుడిలా ఆలోచించాలంటే వాడి వల్ల అవుతుందా?"
ఓ, మరి ఆడపిల్లకెందుకు చెబుతున్నారు సీతమ్మలా ఉండాలని, అనసూయలా ఉండాలని? ఎందుకు సంస్కృతి, కుటుంబ కుల గౌరవాలు, ఆఖరికి తన ఫిసికల్ సేఫ్టీ బరువు బాధ్యతలు పూర్తిగా ఆడవాళ్ళ మీద వేస్తారు? మొగవాళ్ళకేమో కాస్త మనిషిలా ప్రవర్తించండిరా అని కూడా చెప్పలేనప్పుడు?

8. "..సమాజాన్ని దృష్టిలో పెట్టుకొని మన పద్ధతి మనము మార్చుకోవద్దా.."
మీకు మీరు అన్వయించుకోలేరా ఈ స్టేట్మెంట్ ని? మీరు మారండి బయట సమాజం ఇలానే ఉందని. ఎందుకంత తాపత్రయం మరి "భారతీయ సంస్కృతిని" కాపాడేయాలని? అయినా సమాజం మారాలని పోరాడకుంటే దేశానికి స్వాతంత్రం వచ్చేదా, ఈ మాత్రం అన్నా power imbalance తగ్గేదా?

9. "..మన భారతీయ సంస్కృతి సమన్వయ సంస్కృతి.."
An insiduous capture of important terms. కొన్నేళ్ళ కింద ప్రభుత్వం ఎవడు national/anti-national అని తీర్మానించినట్టు, మీరెవరు సార్ "భారతీయ సంస్కృతి" మీద copyright పుచ్చుకోటానికి? అంటే మీ guidelines follow కాని ప్రతి అమ్మాయి భారతీయురాలు అని చెప్పుకోడానికి అర్హురాలు కాదా? నేను మీ భగవద్గీతలు, పురాణాలు ఏవీ చదవలేదు. మన రాజ్యాంగం కొంత వరకు చదివాను. కాని నన్ను నేను భారతీయుడిగానే పరిగణించుకుంటాను, బయట పరిచయం చేసుకుంటాను. నేను ఈ పోస్ట్ రాయటంలో భారతీయ సంస్కృతి తోనే సంభాషిస్తున్నాను. మంచి అనిపించేది నలుగురితో పంచుకొని సెలబ్రేట్ చేస్తున్నాను, చెడు అనిపించింది అర్థం చేసుకొని మార్చే ప్రయత్నం చేస్తున్నాను. సంస్కృతి అంటే ఎప్పుడో ఎవరో చెప్పిందే కాదు కదా? దానిని మన బుద్ధితో, సమాజ అవసరాల మేరకు అన్వయించుకోగలిగినప్పుడే కదా సంస్కృతి regenerate అవుతూ evergreen గా ఉంటుంది. దేశభక్తి, సంస్కృతి పై ఇష్టం, గౌరవం మీకే కాదు మాకూ ఉన్నాయి.

10. "..శృంగారానికి అశ్లీలానికి మధ్య గీతుండాలి.."
మంచికి చెడుకి మధ్య గీత మీరన్నంత క్లియర్ గా ఉంటే ఇంక ఇంత ఆరాటం ఎందుకు. ప్రొఫ్ ప్రతాప్ మెహ్తా ఒక భలే మాట చెప్పారు- "మంచికి చెడుకి తేడా అంత ఈజీ అయితే ఒక రూల్ బుక్ ఉంటే సరిపోతుంది. కోర్ట్లెందుకు, ఆలొచించి తీర్మానించే జడ్జులెందుకు? Principles మనకి ఎంత వరకు పనికొస్తాయంటే అవి మనల్ని వివిధ కోణాల నుండి ఆలోచింప చేస్తాయి. ఆ పైన అన్నింటి కన్నా ముఖ్యమైంది మన జడ్జ్మెంట్". దానికి కావాల్సినది మీరెక్కడో కూర్చోని మంచి/చెడు మధ్య ఒక absolute గీత గీయటం కాదు. ఆ గీతని సమయానుసారంగా గీయగలిగే విచక్షణ ఎలా అలవర్చుకోవాలో ఆ thinking tools ఇచ్చే ప్రయత్నం చేయటం.

11. "..శెనగల్లా వధూమని తన కోరికలని దాచుకోవాలి.."
జీవితమంతా ఆడవాళ్ళ desiresని, agencyని police చేయటమేనా పని? మొగవాడే వాడి కామాన్ని, ఉద్రేకాన్ని జాగ్రత్తగా పొందు పరుచుకోవచ్చు కదా? ఒకసారి ఆలోచించండి.

12. "..చీర కట్టుకొని పద్ధతిగా ఉన్న అమ్మాయిలని వాళ్ళేం అనరు.."
ఆరేళ్ళ పిల్లలు, అరవైయ్యేళ్ళ పెద్దలు ఏం చేసారు మరి అని అడగాల్సి రావటమే ఎంతో బాధాకరంగా ఉంది.

13. "..టీ-షర్ట్ల మీద నినాదాలు చూసి.."
పాపం instructions follow అవుతున్నారా? 'ఆడవాళ్ళకు మాత్రమే' అని సీట్ల మీద రైల్ కంపార్ట్లమెంట్ల మీద ఉంటే మాత్రం అవెందుకు అనుసరించట్లేదో? ఏం సార్ ముందో కెమెరా, మైకుందని ఏది పడితే అది మాట్లాడితే ఎలా?

14. "..వేషాలు మారితే తప్ప అత్యాచారాలు మానవు.."
మరి మీరు చెప్పేదే నిజమైతే, 60-70% రేపులు ఇంట్లోవాడో తెలిసిన వాడో చేస్తాడట. దానికేంటి సమాధానం? స్త్రీవాదుల మీద విరుచుకుపడ్డారే, ఒక్క స్త్రీవాద పుస్తకమైనా చదివారా? వాళ్ళ కథలు విన్నారా? రేప్ కల్చర్ మీద, వుమెన్ హెరస్మెంట్ మీద ఎంతో మంది చేసిన రీసర్చులు చదివారా అసలు sexual harassment మీద మాట్లాడటానికి?

15. "..అత్తగారి వల్ల..డబ్బున్న కుర్రాళ్ళు.."
Random. ఏదన్నా statistical backing ఉందా ఈ claimsకి?

16. "..ధర్మం కోసం సంఘమేది?..ఏది ధర్మమో దాని కోసం పోరాడతాం.."
అదే కదండీ గొడవంతా. మీరు ఇది ధర్మం అంటారు, ఇంకో మతపోడో కులపోడో వచ్చి ఇంకేదో ధర్మం అంటాడు. అందుకే కదా liberal democracyలో individual rightsకి పెద్దపీట వేస్తూ రాజ్యాంగం రాసుకున్నది. నీకు నచ్చినట్టు నువ్వుండు ఆ హక్కు నీకుంది. కానీ ఇంకో మనిషికీ అదే హక్కుంది. అవును సొసైటీలో అంత తేలిక కాదు అంత individually delineatedగా బ్రతకటం. అందుకే కల్చర్, ఎడ్యుకేషన్ వగైరాలు. దానిలో భాగంగానే ఏదో మంచి విషయం తెలుసుకోవాలని ప్రజలు మీలాంటి వాళ్ళ ప్రోగ్రాములు చూసేది. మరి దానికి తగ్గ మాటలే మీరు మాట్లాడుతున్నారా?

ప్రజల మీదా బాధ్యతుంది ఎవరో పండితుడట చెప్పాడు కదాని ఊరేగటం కాకుండా, మన ఆలోచనల్ని, అనుభవాల్ని, విచక్షణని, వివేకాన్ని ఉపయోగించి మంచి చెడు నలుగురితో చర్చించటం. ఆ చర్చలో పాల్గొనాలనే కోరికే ఈ పోస్ట్ కి ప్రేరణ. ఎవరికీ monopoly లేదు సంస్కృతి మీద. మనమంతా ఎలా బ్రతికితే మంచిగా కలిసి బ్రతుకుతాము అనేదే గా మంచి సంస్కృతి. మరి మనుషులు మారుతున్నప్పుడు, ప్రపంచపు స్థితిగతులు మారుతున్నప్పుడు, ఎలా బ్రతకాలి ఎలా మారాలి అనే విషయాలు ever-evolving. అది నిత్య చర్చలో భాగం, నిత్య చర్యలో భాగం. It is the human project. It is on us to remember that we cannot outsource it to anyone- అది PM అయినా సరే, ధార్మిక గురువైనా సరే, కుల పెద్ద అయినా సరే.. ఇంకెవరైనా సరే.

how awesome are books

I had the immense privilege of reading two excellent books in the last few days. I should've been reading sections of Nietezsche's Birth of Tragedy and Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction for my Aesthetics, Criticism and Theory class but I found them too tough and, so in true Dyerian fashion, bunked that to first pick up Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism (that's been in my reading list for a long time) and Amia Srinivasan's The Right to Sex (which I discovered via reviews and bought for Sravani). Oh how fortunate have I been.

Capitalist Realism tied-in neatly with, and enriched, the subject of the relationship between narratives and society that I've been thinking of in the last few months. The central argument of Fisher's thesis is that since the end of the Cold War and the 'End of History', Capitalism has turned into the most hegemonic ideology in the world. Not only has its ubiqutousness blinded us to it omnipresence, but it has also lead to a failure of our imaginations in envisioning alternate forms of organising the economy, and the society. I was reminded of Fisher's book after listening to this interview about the new Auphebunga Bunga book. And it helped me clearly see what Jameson/ Zizek meant when they said, "It is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to Capitalism." 

A major part of it ofcourse is the immense inequality and environmental destruction it creates and Capitalism's refusal to neither care about nor be able to do something about it. But the additional reason I found it incredibly valuable is because it gave credence to my thesis that the failure of imagination, of not being able to envision a different world, is ofcourse a bigger crisis than charting a path to it. We seem resigned to our lives and lifestyles, with both its good and bad, and no wonder it feels like the future is some vague, scary vision. We can see the contours of a catastrophe but because we can't chart a path to avert it, we can only get more anxious and thereby more consumerist (as a coping mechanism). 

So many of the ideas that he explored in the book, among them, Interpassivity, Eternal Presentism and Reflexive Impotence are absolutely remarkable. I found that they spoke to my condition, condition of the people I see and interact it, and I highly recommend it. 

I know that I should be writing a more cogent, useful review but I'm currently so excited with all those ideas floating in my head, that I'm unable to get myself to calm down and share calmly. The same applies to the next book.

The Right to Sex is so important, so accessible and so incredibly thoughtful that I have this extreme urge to shove a copy into the hands of everyone I know. The philosophical tools that Srinivasan gifts are so enriching that I'm filled with immense gratitude. 

Each of the six essays in the book deals with a contemporary problem (usually for Feminists, Progressives and even Liberals), sets the context, gives a historical brief and then lays out arguments from many angles. It is the highest kind of scholarship that I've come across and not least because of its unputdownable readibility. I will try to give a brief of each essay, but I recommend you pick up the book and read it. The follows notes are only so that I can reexperience the pleasure of thinking about those ideas:

1. The conspiracy against men: On the #MeToo movement. And how so many men are freaking out that so many innocent men can be, "are being", unfairly blamed and Cancelled on Social Media. After setting out to disprove that specific claim with statistics, elaborating on the inequal hierarchy even in women who're coming out (class, race, caste, sexuality etc.), she convincingly argues that men who're claiming that they assumed what they were doing was normal, and now have been caught unawares and are being punished retrospectively, are still evading responsibility and refusing to admit to their entitlement. She says it is impossible for most men to not know that what they were doing was wrong. They knew but they didn't care because there would be no retribution. And now what's changed is not them suddenly realising that their actions were wrong but that they're being called out.

2. Talking to my students about porn: Super interesting. Because the target demographic of the problem is the generation after me, I didn't relate too much to it personally. Having said that, the arguments around banning/ allowing porn was very interesting, because it can be applied to, say, item songs in Telugu films (which similarly objectify women for the sake of male arousal), and the analysis of how sites like PornHub, which like any major platform/aggregator, while being shaped by people's preferences also then start shaping people's preferences.

3. The Right to Sex: This and the next essay both confronted my self-proclaimed liberal sensibility.

4. Coda- The Politics of Desire: Somewhere in the middle of this essay, Srinivasan asks an amazing question: True, liberalism is about consent and about individual choice, and while it forbids one from imposing one's desires on others, it also stays away from judging people for their desires (and Id've argued rightly so). But it must also be accepted that our desires are shaped by society. Isn't it, then, important to ask what exactly shapes our desires? Why do we want what we want? What impact do the contours created by the majority, with each individual 'choosing as they wish', have on the minority, who for, ostensibly, no fault of their own, wish differently?

5. On not sleeping with your students: I felt she takes her strongest position in this essay. When dealing with male faculty members who have sexual relations with their female students, she again questions if consent is enough. Srinivasan's arguments regarding the role of the teacher, regarding the insitution of learning, and the implications it could have on the psyche of an individual who probably has internalised some notions of right behaviour and is acting consciously, or unconsciously, on them is an absolute masterclass. This is public philosophy on par with what I heard from Prof. Pratap Bhanu Mehta in his class and from Michael Sandel's Justice book.

6. Sex, Carceralism, Capitalism: This essays extends the Feminist movement to Capitalism and tries to show how it might not be possible to create a just world via Neoliberal Economics. In this essay, specific to the de/criminalisation of sex work, she talks about the reformative vs revolutionary axes of politics. I think it's a really powerful distinction to analyse public policy.

The genius of both books, especially The Right to Sex, is its refusal to reach simplistic conclusions and its willingness to complicate all matter political. The stellar achievement though is that that doesn't create nihilism nor escapism. It reinvigorates the mind and reminds us that the world is incredibly complex, most of our political posturing is so simplistic that it causes more problems than it resolves, and to fight against injustice, not only do we need empathy but also education and imagination.

While I feel I have not done justice to either book, my sincere hope is that my enthusiasm is communicated and will make you want to read the books yourselves.

1001 ways to be civilized

The first time I saw Siva, a few years ago, I remarked that it was a neo-western. I hadn't, still haven't, seen any of the original Westerns but the following is what I learnt by cultural osmosis of what the genre signified:

• There is a lawless land.
• An outsider representing law and order, usually a sheriff or a morally upright outlaw, arrives.
• He tries to stay away from the gangs but is reluctantly drawn into a confrontation when he saves an innocent man.
• He then tries to leave the town but by then the citizens see in him a saviour and plead him to stay.
• While he takes on the burden and starts to transform the town, the main villain refuses to change and builds a personal hatred towards the hero.
• The villain then destroys something the hero holds as sacred/ innocent.
• Eventually, the hero is forced to 'act' like the villain and kill him.

Siva follows the template almost to the T. It is an extraordinary film, not just for it's technical excellence and narrative design, but also for the themes and topics it tackles. While rewatching the film today, after listening to the brilliant episode on The Other Banana podcast, I realised that it also does a brilliant job of portraying what I think is one of the foundational problems of a modern, liberal society. 

Namely, how do you deal with the illiberal minority in society that lays claim to power¹? 

Especially, when that minority manages to form a nexus with certain arms of the state. To be fair this is not a problem just with liberal societies. Primitive societies are infact exactly this where a king or a lord or a priest or the head of the family etc. is the illiberal dominant force acting upon the individual. So infact a modern society evolved as a reaction to this. So the problem with a liberal society is not that it desires this sort of an arrangement but while seeking specifically to avoid this, almost always ends up in this state.

This is a truth for most of us experientially. We have seen  the local rowdy who demands Ganesh chanda; The corporator who draws borewell water from the locality and sells it; The Hindutva goon who roams around with rakhis on Valentine's Day; The policeman who gets together with the builder/MLA and causes problems to the landowners. Basically anybody with power who wants something that isn't lawfully theirs. I won't go deeper into this here because I think it's clear to the reader what I'm talking about but I highly recommend Amit Varma's episode with Milan Vaishnav to get an excellent high-level understanding of why there's such a deep relationship between politicians and goons in India.

It is inevitable in any society that there be illiberal folks. Sometimes their fight maybe valid but as someone who celebrates and wants to live in a liberal society, I'd rather they not take over the parliament. Ofcourse it is hard, if not ever entirely right, to divide people into liberal and illiberal types (funnily, group identity is one of the things the liberal in me desists), for the sake of explaining I will use Atishi Marlena's Bell Curve Model:

20% of people in society are fierce liberals and will do everything in their power to fight illiberal forces.

20% of people are illiberals and will try to capture power and oppress others.

60% don't care too much either way but are still individually rational. So they'll try to game the system, but not too much, no matter what its nature. 

The fight then is between rule of law and autocracy. Between civility (all people are equal) and barbarity (power is right). The assumption being that a society is more humane when it veers more towards the former than the latter. 

Stating the terms of discussion as I have creates a picture of a noble army standing at the gates against the hordes of barbarians. That description is not very accurate. The critical difference being that the enemy is within the gates and is looking to take over the citadel. One of the critical safeguards the constitutional founders had for this problem was separation of powers. Ensure that an individual or a small group can never get enough power to become authoritative. Yet the more distributed the power, the harder it is to create consensus and take definitive action. So as some aspects start moving too slowly or seem less accountable or cause resenment in particular sections, it is natural for people to look for definitive, fast-moving reforms especially when that resentment reaches a critical mass. And that in turn makes the figure of the strong-willed king more alluring². But isn't that exactly the kind of autocracy we wanted to get away from in the first place. So what do we do³?

That brings us to the alternative the film, and Plato, offers. The concept of a philosopher-king. Give us somebody with power and strength who can fight for us, while also ensuring that he isn't weak or malicious enough to be corrupted by power.

Ofcourse the law of entropy states that no matter who is in power, eventually corruption will become so deep-rooted that the entire system will collapse⁴. No wonder stories of all great society are called 'The Rise and Fall of'. The question is, What you as a liberal would rather fight - Incoherence or Domination?

¹ It goes without saying that power can be of any nature. It could be about being physically violent, about being majoritarian, group over individual and even claiming an autonomy over religious interpretation and punishing those who don't toe the line.

² I think it is clear at this point that I'm using UPA IIs messy coalition politics, with a weak centre, as one of the primary reasons Modi's 'decisive', autocratic persona seemed attractive in 2014.

³ Amit Varma asks his guests if they believe in The Great Man Theory of history. Dr JP says that history is created both by large, extrahuman factors but also shaped by human actors. I think I agree with him.

⁴ I don't want to sound fatalistic here and say, "Oh in the end all of us are going to die anyway. So what's the point of all this?". To build a good human society is to stave off suffering to as many beings as possible for as long as possible and that is the assumption on which this discussion takes place.

P.S- As is often the case, this piece too started off as a hypothesis before veering off into unexpected directions and ending in a cul-de-sac. Sravani says, and I think she's right, that I have this problem where one attempt at an answer to a question leads to more questions. So in the end I'm left with a bunch of nested open brackets with very few closed brackets. 

I have tried staving this off by sitting on posts in the hope that I will work on them and build something more coherent and finished. More often than not I get bored and it just sits there. So I'd rather post this stuff here not at all as authoritative pieces but simply as acts of thinking in public in the hope they add some value to the world.

children of a different domain9

The challenge is obvious.

I have been meaning to write a post for the past few weeks with that openings line. I wanted to reiterate how we are, in most aspects, narrative beings. The piece would then go on to try and explain why we seem to be in doldrums for the past few decades as a society. It is because the older frameworks or the 'founding mythology platforms' are not working and the new ones haven't taken shape/ become strong yet. One of the primary reasons the older mythologies do not seem to have the strength to hold us is because they only work if they are accepted/ 'believed in' by a critical mass (like a currency) and that has been corroded by the doctrine of individuality (which is probably the last of our most widespread myths)¹. 

The piece would then expand on what I have been doing over the last few years to stitch for myself a fairly cohesive platform to function more effectively. The new platform would be put together by the remnants of what I'd read, learnt, understood, imagined and it would find a way to take forward the best of my desires while also trying to explain the world (both internal and external) to myself. 

The more I think about it, the more I am inclined to see mental models as a software stack. And in that sense, a founding mythology platform is the Operating System. The assembly layer below is made up of intuitions and heuristics, and the hardware layer corresponds with the wiring of my brain. Similarly, going up the stack, the applications and web pages, are more local, specific and can be picked-up or discarded more easily.

I haven't written that piece because I have not been able to find the proper mechanism for elaborating and arguing on it. The reason I'm mentioning it here is if I don't get around to blogging about it later², I want this to be a marker of that idea and how engrossed I've been in it for the last few weeks³.

--

I have been reading a bit about evolution in the last few months. I had the following eureka moment earlier while walking⁴:

    a. It is said that the primary desire of every living being is to survive and procreate

    b. The mechanism used by living beings to propagate themselves is via genes

    c. Richard Dawkins, in The Selfish Gene, flips the axiom and says that it is the gene that wants to propagate and so uses us as vehicles to do that

    d. Let's call the characteristic of the gene that makes it want to propagate itself (I can sense that this formulation is wrong because genes probably aren't conscious and can't really "wan't") meme-ing

    e. A meme, usually, is used to refer to a unit of culture that behaves analogous to a gene

Now that I have this little conceptual framework, let me try to use this to interpret one specific aspect of my personality.

    a. I don't think I really want to have children. At this point in time. And I know there are atleast a few more people like me (trust me, I keep a lookout for them)

    b. But I also know I'm a biological being and it is evident that I'm driven by biological urges like hunger, sleep, physical comfort, sexual interest etc.

Then how/why is it that I don't want children. I see three possible explanations:

    a. The genes that drive me are a random mutation (of the more normal human variant) that doesn't want to propagate. This is a possiblity because mutations do happen (because of faulty copying) that could lead to these kind of'negative' outcomes. If that's true, nothing to talk about there.

    b. I see what is going on in the world, with the large scale suffering, political instability, climate crisis etc., and my cultural (culture here as opposed to nature) intelligence has taken over and is appealing to my 'better' instincts. This again seems like a possibility. It is this intelligence that stops us from eating too much sugar, from indulging in socially unacceptable sexual relations, from controlling our immediate impulses in favour of a longer well-being etc. But I also know that while powerful, cultural/social intelligence is not entirely sufficient so it needs to create an acceptable alternative to biological needs/desires (Like how we 'live' through movies and play out our desires as imaginations)⁷. But sooner or later, because of natural selection, people like this obviously die out and are replaced by those types who have more children. And assuming we are children of those children, our biological urges should overcome our cultural inclinations. And yet people like me are still being born. How come?

    c. And this brings to the core of my argument. What if, in the past few centuries, the world has seen a paradigm shift where memes have become more powerful than genes. 

    One is the sci-fi dystopian way of looking at it: genes evolved long enough for us to become sophisticaed enough to create the internet, and now the internet is filled with memes. The memes have the machines now to take over the world, so they don't mind us dying out and the machines, with increasing intelligence, will become smart enough to keep propogating the memes. 

    A less dramatic way of looking at it would be: Cultural artefacts/ memes are their creators' children too but of a different type. So instead of having kids (maybe 2/3) and taking care of them, and hoping they grow healthy and smart, and live long enough to copulate and pass on their (my?) genes further, people with this mindset want to create films/songs/books/scientific theorems that will propagate and live long enough to create derivatives of their own⁸. 

    Wouldn't that assure my immortaility as well atleast to a certain extent? And while nourishing memes needs work, it's probably less energy-intensive, needs less maintenance and I can spawn (conscious use of the word) way more of them and hope atleast one of them survives than keep all my eggs (ha!) in two or three human baskets.

I know this is a ridiculously simplistic, not to mention a primal/jungle-law view of the world, and my worldview is way more romantic than this on most days, but looking from the viewpoint of a certain kind of evolutionary logic, I don't think it's entirely inelegant.

¹ Like Venkatesh Rao once so beautifully put it, and I paraphrase, "There is nothing more commonplace in American society than the belief in individualism"

² This probably can be explained by my intermittent need to be seen as a more serious writer than a mere blogger, and so my refusal to part with what I think are major ideas/insights as just blogposts. Unsurprisingly, now, I never get around to doing that so I probably should resign myself/accept/celebrate that I'm a blogger and what is form but the easiest/malleable/longstanding way for you to put the happenings inside you out to the world

³ This part is just a diggression right at the beginning. The main content of this blogpost is the consciously small, to-the-point argument of the next part

⁴ Disclaimer - Please note, if it isn't clear from the stuff published on this blog already, most of what I know comes from magazine articles, cursory readings of Wikipedia pages, and occassionally a non-fiction book intended for a general audience. A lot of the knowledge comes peripherally as part of living in an information network⁵. So when I quote theories and technical terms, they are to be understood as representations in pop culture and drawing room discussions

⁵ Thank god for How to talk about books you haven't read which in true Post-Modern⁶ fashion, I'm talking about without reading

⁶ I don't mean whatever it means. I mean what I think others think when I use the term

⁷ I think masturbation is a good example. It is a coping mechanism against the internal pressure of having to find suitable, attractive mating partner all the time

⁸ As I write this, I remember one of David Eagleman's stories in Sum where people die twice: once when they die physically, later when everyone on earth who knows about them, by whatever means, dies too

⁹ Domain as in biological taxonomy. I wanted to use a more poetic term, like realm or empire instead of domain, but in line with the functional tone of the piece, stuck to the most prosaic of terms available

రాయమనే కథలే ఓ సంచారి

On most days, I don't really understand what goes on in my head. Sometimes it's nice, when I'm surprised that I know the answer to a question I didn't know I knew. At times it's a thrill when I'm trying to remember the name of a filmmaker and try to go around clicking hyperlinks in my head until, voila!, I suddenly reach the destination. But many times, it's infuriating/ alarming/ exhausting to learn that what I thought, what I was led to believe, was a permanent fixture, suddenly revealed its transcience and simply disappeared. This is as true for interests and worldviews as it is for resolutions and emotions. The latter two I understand, having lived with them all my life more or less. The former two I'm still coming to terms with. 

Let me try to illustrate the point with an example: A month ago, I discovered this wonderful podcast called History of Philosophy. As usual, I didn't just want to dip into it but wanted immerse myself in it, to start from the basics, so I started from the first of over a hundred episodes. I heard 3 or 4. Loved them. I went around looking for essays/ books involved. I felt that I had discovered what it is that I wanted to do, that this was to be my vocation. I imagined myself going back to college to study, impress everyone with my original mind and do tremendous research that would bring me joy and accolades. I beat everyone I spoke to with that hammer for those few days. It also became my stock lens for understanding my world. And as suddenly as it flared up, my interest in that dissipated. I realised I wasn't able to concentrate on the podcast, I had to keep rewinding. Then I spent the next few days cursing my immense stupidity for letting my fantasy take wings despite similar previous experiences. I told myself that I should learn from this experience and embrace who I was. That my interests were varied and the intensity with which I pursued them would ebb and flow. That my primary mistake was my desperate need to associate myself with one thing at the cost of everything else. I was looking for that one thing which would let me escape from the frustrations and consolations of having to keep thinking, keep figuring out, keep updating my mental models. That I was trying to live like an archetype, for the simple reason that it'd cost my less mental energy, instead of celebrating the reality that my being couldn't be reduced to simplistic tropes. I knew that this solace was temporary too but I enjoyed it. I hoped to learn from it and deal with the next crest with more equanimity, all the while knowing that I possibly couldn't hold onto this rock of realization when the next wave inevitably hit with surprise and force. That I'd dive in naively, greedily, because it was too hard to resist the temptation. 

And as if on cue, the next wave, Christopher Nolan's films, hit rightaway. Back to square one of fantasizing and imagining and telling myself that I'd finally arrived at my truth. WashRinseRepeat.

I'm not exactly complaining because I genuinely seem to enjoy this aspect of myself. Truth be told, I'm probably too much in love with myself so its actually a bit of a problem. But I find it interesting at my mind's capacity to shift and change so much while also essentially remaining roughly in the same area. My interests haven't changed drastically- It's still mostly a bit of science, a bit of society, philosophy, art and tech. It's the temporariness and, more interestingly, the intensity that's.. well, what exactly is it?

--

I watched a few films in the last few weeks and I've been meaning to briefly write about four:

• Siddu Jonnalagadda's Krishna and His Leela, and Maa Vinta Gaadha Vinuma. I call them Siddu Jonnalagadda's because despite being helmed by different directors, he co-wrote, edited and played the lead role in both and I see enough simalarity between them to claim that they both carry his signature. I thoroughly enjoyed both movies- the humour, the charm, the urban upper-middle class air, the women. I also like how plot mechanics really kick in only, almost like an afterthought, at the end. Viva Harsha is growing on me, especially after Colour Photo, and I love his exchange with Krishna in the pub:

• అన్యాయం గురు ఆ అమ్మాయి
• నాటె జోకూ
• అజ్జా బాన్ చేయాలి అలాంటోళ్ళని
• వాటె.. నువ్వు నేను నూతిలో కప్ప
• వేర్వేరు
• ఇట్సె బొంబై మాటర్ రా ఇదంతా, నీకర్థం కాట్లేదు. ఇట్సె యో.. ఖూ..

• Gaadha was more mainstream in its treatment if not for its plot but I like how things were kept interesting by using Bharani gari character as a framing device. And the idea to cast Fish Venkat as Fish Venkat was gobsmackingly inspired. I also liked the Carnatic tinged music of both films though it infuriates Sravani to listen to this 'debasement'. So I listen to it on headphones.
• Chaitanya Tamhane's The Disciple is a remarkable achievement. I found out about Court years ago, via Moi Fight Club I think, and took pride in the fact that it'd premiered in Venice. When I watched it, I liked it but I thought it was a bit too pretentious. And at that point in time, I was a huge pretentious snob myself (you should see my absolutely ignorant, inferiority-complex-shrink-wrapped-in-superiority-complex comment on BR sir's blogpost about Ship of Theseus to know what I mean. I can't because it literally gives me goosebumps from embarassment) so I suppose I need to rewatch it to make a more upto-date, hopefully more genuine, judgement. I fell in love with The Disciple as I was watching it because it genuinely made me feel, and to a large extent remind similar feelings of ineptitude, what it is to desperately seek greatness. While this would've made it a great film in itself, what drove it to stratospheric heights is the scene in the bar where Sharad hears stories about Maai that he doesn't want to. While I could go into a pedestrian interpretation of how it throws a light on the need for deities, I will refrain from doing that because it'll debase the impact of the film. I will suffice it to say that Tamhane's control was such that my impression of Maai totally flipped after that. I was thrilled.
• I can't remember why I didn't watch Dunkirk earlier, it's probably got to do with my usual grandstanding about how Nolan is a limited director without inspiration, which ironically was probably lifted from Tom Shone's profile of the man in The Guardian, but I watched it a few weeks ago because I knew I was going to get a copy of The Nolan variations. I must say I enjoyed it and I found Nolan's use of different timeframes really interesting. While it makes for great cinema, and that can be a respectable end in itself, I also thought it did a meta-commentary on cinema itself. We tend to remember 2 hours of a great movie more vividly than months, if not years, of our lives. And in that sense technology, both physical and mental (eg: narratives), help us get more bang for the buck. If one way to measure the 'success' of a life is to manage to collate the 'memorable experiences', while understanding that at any point in time we are what we have access to, both within our head and without, then these technologies allow you to pack in more within a life. So maybe there is a way to say objectively that my life is better, in terms of how fulfilling it is and how much I enjoy it, than that of an average person born 2000 years ago, or 15000 years ago, or even 100 years ago. In a way technology allows you to have greater leverage over your immediate physical spacetime and consequently on your agency which must be one of the foundations of a good life. 

--

April also happened to be the month when I was able to read/listen/think about ideas that I was able to put together to form a interesting little framework. Now that I think about it, my interest in Nolan's adamant materialism was probably lead by this phase which in turn was preceded by reading about/around Darwinian Evolution in the previous few months.

Here they are:

• I'd been reading Dr. Velcheru Narayana Rao and Dr. David Shulman's extraordinary Classical Telugu Poetry, and as I was going through the long introductory essay, it struck me that  it was probably the first time in my life that I was reading an introduction and exploration of Telugu culture from a Social Science view. They had placed the poets, and by extension their works, in the context of the social, cultural, political and economic conditions in which they lived and worked. Maybe it'd been done before but I hadn't been fortunate enough to come across that interpretation. The little old Telugu culture I had read/heard/was told about had, for the most part, spoken about these mythologies and works of literature as being born fully formed. They were అపౌరుషము. Again, apologies if that's not true, but that's how I saw them. And so they became hard to access, their apparent perfection both uninteresting and hard to believe. This essay, by charting the evolution of the form across the ages, and by creating brief but humanising sketches of the poets helped me get over my bias (that I'd developed as a resistance in my childhood when I was told that these were great but never really learned how they came about) and made me feel grateful and fortunate to be able to access them centuries and worlds away from where they were created. The material aspect of it made them so much more real and precious. I could sense their humanity reaching out from far, far away.
• I discovered David Deutsch's The Beginning of Infinity in Naval Ravikant's podcast. While I've listened to only a couple of hours of the audiobook, I found his articulation of the Scientific Method quite helpful. Deutsch coins a phrase called 'Good Explanation' which he says is essentially how human progress is/ has been made. So religious concepts, mythologies, folklore, heuristics, customs/ rituals, infact maybe even superstitions, are developed by humans to better understand their environment so that they can thrive. What we call Science, and he argues that Enlightenment is the inflection point, is essentially the best method we have discovered as a species for generating 'Good explanations' about the world. Every theory that comes up not only is not final but in some ways both is created by and subsumes the previous explanation because it had proved inadequate to the task. I found this model of thinking quite useful. Another argument that absolutely floored me was his insistence that scientific discovery, despite its popular image to the contrary, is a supremely creative act. Infact, all theorising is. He says that we don't go around looking for data and then let theory drift up, so to speak, once enough data has been collected but create theories and then go about verifying their validity as more and more observations are recorded. I found this flip absolutely riveting and I think it makes sense in my day-to-day experience.
• In Jonardon Ganeri's essay for Aeon on the Tree of Knowledge, which is a terrific read in its entirety, he writes about how what we generally assume to be laws of living, that are handed down by our parents as traditions, are best understood as methods or strategies that must be applied intelligently. There need not be anything irrefutable/sacred about them. This again was extremely liberating because I had spent years listening to people tell me that one should follow the guru, not everything can be understood via the intellect, that these traditions have been handed over by 'masters' and the like. Nothing against them but now I was able to see that these are probably part of just one method of pursuing whatever it is that you're seeking and so all other methods aren't misplaced or wrong by definition. Limited, maybe. Primitive, maybe. Valid nonetheless.
• From that essay, I discovered the History of Philosophy podcast written by Ganeri and Peter Adamson. I haven't gone past the first few episodes, yet, but I'd made one staggering discovery. That the what we call the six systems of Hindu Philosophy, Samkhya, Yoga, Nyaya, Vaiseshika, Mimamsa and Vedanta actually started as certain methods of understanding and interpreting the world. So, for example, Samkhya started by the belief that enumerating the world was a good method to get started for understanding it. Similarly, Mimamsa was apparently about inference and analogy via argument to understand. Likewise, Yoga was literally about putting various things together and building a more cohesive worldview. A union in that sense of the word. Again, I need to reinstate that my knowledge of this is extremely rudimentary and I could be totally wrong in all this. Neither have I gone back to confirm if this is what was told in the podcast, nor cross-referenced it from other sources. What I'm trying to put across is what I started thinking after listening to those episodes and that I find it useful in thinking about the world.

From what I can surmise, the one common thread among all these ideas has been the material and evoltionary aspect of things.  This, like I stated earlier, probably comes from my cursory readings of Darwinism which I must've sought out in the first place because I was looking for an alternative to more, for the lack of a better word now, supernatural explanations of the world I live in. Not that they are necessarily wrong, it's just that at this point in time, I neither find them convincing nor useful. It could be a right hunch or my limited capability, but at this point in time, they don't seem right.

Sticking to more materialistic, this-worldly explanations also lets me feel pride and a sense of community with other humans. For as long as I sought ways which were either religious or mystical, I felt a sense of inadequacy in being myself. As if I had fallen and had to be lifted by a guru or some such deus ex machina. As if I could only be hauled across by a benevolent deity. This, on the other hand, while making me feel genuine humility at the extent of things I didn't know, atleast fills me with awe, gratitude and belonging with a much larger family of human beings across time and space. I can feel a sense of kinship. I feel less alone, less deficient. I don't know if its the right thing. Except it feels right. And that's my sole compass; Atleast for now.

AK/DB

My head contains a few fascinating dichotomies- Dravid/Laxman, Federer/Nadal, Anurag/Dibakar etc. Ofcourse, like some mental models, they are less accurate depictions of the world than arbitrary placeholders to interpret and communicate better. Deekshith and I spent hours discussing Dravid/Laxman. We love both of them but it is more interesting, and revealing, to ascribe to them select characteristics and debate on which are more valuable/cool. So, Dravid's the architect, the spine, the selfless, disciplined monk; Laxman's the artist, the lifeblood, the impulsive, imaginative artist. Similarly, Federed/Nadal is the distinction between a gifted genius and a never-say-die hustler¹. Invariably, the approach is reductive. Humans, probably achievers of that level even more so, are way more complex and adaptive than these characters. Yet, narratives need characters and we need narratives to not only understand the world but even build our personalities.

In the world of cinema, we have, say, Nolan/Fincher or Truffaut/Godard or Ray/Ghatak. Let me reiterate: the classifications are almost arbitrary and generally speaking the folks who are discussing like both people but are trying to convince the other, while simultaneously trying to tell themselves, why one is better than the other². My favourite point of departure, and I suspect to a lot of Indian film aficianados of my generation, is Anurag Kashyap/Dibakar Banerjee³. I could spend, and infact have, hours going through their filmographies with an equally passionate friend. 

To set out the rules of the game, let me sketch their personalities from my understanding of their films:

AK is the prodigy, the angry, driven artist. Someone so immensely talented and so in love with films that he managed to crack, and infact reshape, Indian cinema despite being immensely sensitive and genuinely naive in many aspects. It is hard to imagine Anurag being anything other than the filmmaker that he is, someone who learnt films organically and operates intuitively.

DB is the smartass, someone who's always carried a chip on his shoulder for being the cleverest person in the room. His approach to cinema is scientific, almost clinical, mixed with a dash of whimsy and genuine whackiness. He could've earned success in any field, and to a certain extent did, with his fierce intellect and ease of expression. I suspect the primary reason he ended up being a filmmaker was because it afforded him an opportunity to fiddle with his myriad interests.

Both are unarguably immense talents and it is my pleasure and privilege that I've been able to watch their artistic journeys evolve. 

Sandeep aur Pinky faraar is a terrific watch. It gave me a lot to think about, both while watching and later too. There, lies for me, the essence of DB's filmography. I love every one his film's I've watched because they appeal to my intellect, to my aesthetic taste, to my sensibility. I believe I understand his worldview. I respect his craft and am stunned by some imaginative leaps. But I don't really feel anything for the characters. Again, let me be clear, I don't mean it as a complaint. I'm very happy for what he makes. I'm just making an observation. I felt nothing when the lovers are butchered in the masterful first segment of LSD, not when Dr. Ahmadi is killed, not when Salman learns about Reena's affair with Sudhir, and not when Sandeep miscarries⁴. I clearly, indelibly, am aware of the artist behind these machinations. They are almost scientific observations of characters⁵. He works with types to tease out human behaviour and so characters, despite being interesting in themselves, work as part, and only as part, of the narrative.

AK is a master storyteller and while I don't particularly feel much for his characters too, probably because of his total immersion and love for 'mainstream' cinema I feel that his characters frequently exceed their brief and pull the narrative in their directions. Which is why his characters seem so real and emphatic. I'm thinking right now of Badshah Khan in Black Friday and how I genuinely felt for him. Even larger-than-life, seemingly unreal characters like Faizal Khan can't help but reveal their humanity. That is probably why his observations of small-town India seem more sincere than DB's scientific curiosity. AK genuinely seems interested in people for their own sake; DB is happier interpreting them as nodes in much larger social structures. 

Before I let you go, I want to spend a little time comparing AK's short from Bombay Talkies and DB's short from Lust Stories (my favourite film from each anthology)⁶. The ambition of AK's short is so immense, and his cinematic grammar, including the delicious use of songs and slo-mo is so exhilarating, that it felt like a perfect encapsulation of what it means to spend sometime inside his head. This is gutsy, instinctive filmmaking- a small town guide having the courage, and the naivety, to dream that he could meet Amitabh Bachchan. AK thinks of the world as an immense movie theatre. There are so many interesting characters, so many larger-than-life dreams, so many quirks and anxieties and ambitions that it must be extremely hard to choose one story and travel with it long enough to transcribe it into a movie⁷. DB's Lust Stories short film on the other hand is a very intimate, and immensely tragic, story of a man having an affair with his best friend's wife. These are extremely rich, privileged people and yet they are sad, lonely, cynical. DB does not treat the story by amping up the pain, confusion, frustration. They are all self-contained (almost always), intelligent, articulate, yet not smart enough to truly understand, or even attempt to learn, what it is that they're truly feeling and want from life. One way of narrating this story is to turn it into a heightened drama. Another would be to turn it into a bleak, despairing account of a cold, cruel world. Maybe there are other interpretations but I can think of only these two now. DB does neither. He goes the matter-of-fact route. The characters don't transform, they don't learn something about themselves, they don't really evolve, there is no new knowledge being conferred on their beings. They remain who they are- bitter adults living in self-denial. But they're not depressives, they're like many adults. And when they think of their past, they remember it with longing and nostalgia. They laugh easy. The scene of them talking, Sanjay Kapoor eating, Jaideep Ahlawat cutting mangoes when a dead-serious conversations suddenly takes a turn into sheer absurdity ("half-fry, half-fry, half-fry") and they burst out laughing is cinematic gold. Not only does it tell me about those two, and about many men I know including myself, it also tells us how easily we navigate the multitudes of our selves.

A part of me also understands that reducing each movie to its 'essential' scenes or trying to unpack what 'core ideas' the filmmaker is trying to convey in this cinematic contraption is ridiculous. And I hope this doesn't really come off like that. But I use these specific scenes/tropes to interpret and communicate my thoughts and feelings.

Like I said, I love these artists and I'm so grateful to them for their work. Thinking and talking about cinema is one of my life's greatest pleasures.

¹Sportswriters are enviably good at painting characters with a few broad strokes. Rohit Brijnath's essay on Fab Five is a brilliant illustration of that type of writing. The Architect/Artist label comes from, if I remember rightly, Rahul Bhattacharya

²It goes without saying, and yet I feel compelled to spell it out, that this is not similar to guys fighting over who is the bigger star or the more popular politician

³I've been meaning to do this post for years now but this sudden drive comes from having just returned home after watching Sandeep aur Pinky faraar

⁴I'm thinking where this expectation to empathise and feel for/as characters comes from? That's the grammar of mainstream cinema, right?

⁵There's something Kubrickian about his work

⁶I want to spend sometime later thinking about the similarities and differences between the opening, long shots of Mukkabaaz and Sandeep aur Pinky. I don't understand how but if someone had showed me these two shots in isolation, I have a feeling I would've been able to easily point out which was made by DB and which one by AK

⁷To be fair, this insight is not very original. It seems to come largely from what Zoya Akhtar spoke about him in a Rajeev Masand interview before the release of Bombay Talkies

a bicycle for my mind

The Seen and the Unseen is not just my favourite podcast. It is, and apologies for my inability to come up with a more appropriate phrase now, the world feed I most look forward to across all media. I absolutely adore good conversations, and Amit Varma's podcast has given my way more than I could ever have asked for. He's recorded 215 episodes as of this week and I must've listen to about 50 (including the rare abandoned ones) and I thought I'd list my favourite conversations and highlight one or two memorable takeaways. 

So, in no particular order:

• Fixing Indian Education with Karthik Muralidharan- Probably, by a tiny margin, my favourite episode. Not only is the subject matter important enough to demand complete attention, on top of that Muralidharan's energy and optimism is infectious. Key takeaways, from memory: the sorting vs the human development functions of education, the ineffectiveness of increasing teacher salaries on teaching standards, implementation of vouchers to create dynamism and competitiveness among government schools. Also, Pareto principle is very useful- 80% outcomes come from 20% of the effort.
  
• What have we done with our independence with Pratap Bhanu Mehta- Prof. Mehta says something terrific and I paraphrase, "We usually blame our politicians for changing their statements. While a politician must have principles, we must remember that they do not have an autonomy over truth. It is their responsibility to listen to competing claims, arbitrate between them, and take them to positions of power. In that regard, a politician's willingness to backtrack on previous utterances is a feature not a bug. We should be more afraid of those in authority who steadfastly hold their opinions in the face of contrary evidence. Also, sometime in the last few decades, we mistook respecting others people with respecting all opinions.
  
• The Ideas of our Constitution with Madhav Khosla- Madhav is one of my favourite scholars, for his ability to convert seemingly boring Civics textbook stuff to thought-provoking philosophy. He also brings history back to life with terrific immediacy. From this episode, I remember two things: 1. If democracy was just about elections, then we wouldn't need such a big constitution filled with guidelines and rules. They would've just said, win elections and do what you want. 2. The Indian Constitution was created to be an edifying document. And its intention was to make us equal citizens by treating us as one.
• Who broke our Republic? with Kapil Komireddi- The genius of Nehru's (via Khilnani) Idea of India is that it is expansive enough to hold all the other ideas of India. It is, in my opinion, the highest manifestation of a liberal society because it accommodates, and celebrates, (almost) the entire spectrum of humanity.
• Jahangir the Curious with Parvati Sharma- There's this lovely bit where she conveys how quickly the Mughuls became 'Hindustan-ized' using a vivid illustration, and I paraphrase, "Babar, who never felt at home in India would go to Afghanistan and Uzbekistan at the slightest pretext. And there he would happily gorge on melons and pomegranates, claiming that they were the best fruits in the world. His great-grandson, 70 years later, when he went to Afghanistan and tasted melons, scowled and said that they were no match to the greatest fruit in the world- the mangoes of Hindostan."
• The art of narrative non-fiction with Samanth Subramanian- I absolutely love Samanth's writing, my favourite is this autobiographical sketch about quizzing, and in this episode he elucidates on how he designs his non-fiction pieces. Essentially, the quest is to identify the themes around the topic at hand and find angles to interpret them. Once those are in place, the piece must stitch a narrative through them.
• BJP before Modi with Vinay Sitapati- I find Sitapati to be an electrifying communicator of his work. I liked this conversation so much that I read Jugalbandi the following week and thoroughly enjoyed it. My key learning came when Sitapati said, "Our fears that we will end up in a Hindu Rashtra in the future are moot. We already live in a Hindu Rashtra. The BJP is not fascist. They do not need to abolish elections. Infact, the RSS/ BJP's one hundred year old project is to consolidate the Hindu vote. Once they have it, they will always be in the majority." Another useful framework for understanding BJP's thought process is their obsession with 3 things: 1. Hindu Unity 2. Sacred Geography 3. Demography and Elections. From his method of working, another nugget was, "Perfection is the enemy of production".
  
• A scientist in the kitchen with Krish Ashok- Another episode I absolutely loved and bought the book of. I am so grateful to Krish for demystifying and deromanticising the act/ art of cooking. And for unequivocally saying that there is no 'authentic' version of a dish. If you find something tasty and nutritious, then its good enough.
• Indian Society: the last 30 years with Santosh Desai- This was a lot of fun too primarily because I love listening to anything about India since the 90s. I remember Desai articulating something that I'd always felt but more succinctly, "The ceremonies and rituals of a court house exist to obfuscate and distract us from the fact that an individual, the judge, does not really have the moral right to pass sentence against another individual, the implicated citizen. The rituals of a modern, secular nation-state, then, are not very different from the ceremonies of a medieval kingdom."
  
• Political Ideology in India with Rahul Verma- Verma talks about the book he co-authored with Pradeep Chhibber on ideology in India and he argues that the western classifications of Left and Right (Social or Economic) don't apply to societies like India which are much more diverse. Instead, they point to four different axes (federalism vs centralism, reservation vs anti-reservation.. I can't remember the other two) and I found that a much more useful apparatus to differentiate between the ideologies (atleast on paper) of different political parties in India.
  
• The Gita Press and Hindu Nationalism with Akshaya Mukul- I discovered the podcast when I started reading Jaithirth Rao's The Indian Conservative on Juggernaut, didn't like it too much, but wanting to learn more about the conservative cause in India, looked up to see if he had spoken in a podcast. That's when I found his Seen and the Unseen episode, and finding him equally unimpressive there as well, abandoned that episode but I guess I must've liked Amit's style of interviewing enough to try another episode; This must've been around Oct 2019. And this is the episode that I selected and boy was it the right choice. It is still in my top 5 episodes of the show and it was an absolute blast listening to the conversation. Mukul's analysis of the Hindu Right's evolution was staggering both in its scope and lucid presentation. And my respect for him increased manyfold when I discovered, months later, that he refused to collect a prize for the book because it was being handed over by Modi.

Honourable mentions- I enjoyed these episodes as well but don't have/ remember one or two 'money insights'- The art of translation with Arunava Sinha, Srinath Raghavan's three episodes, Manu S Pillai's three episodes, Ramachandra Guha's Gandhi episodes, Matt Ridely's Evolution episode among many others. I'm actually surprised by how few episodes I've listed because I could spend hours talking about the stuff I've learned from the show but I guess this list will have to do for now. It's more a sign of my rusty writing than anything else.

That's my very succinct introduction, and a minor recommendation list, to the Seen and the Unseen. In all honesty, until I discovered this podcast, I had no idea a cultural artefact like this could be, would be, created about India today. For that, I'm filled with gratitude and appreciation for Amit. 

I have spent enough hours listening to the podcast while vacuuming the house, setting clothes out for drying, walking around Westmead/ Wentworthville, to the library, to the swimming pool, to Coles/ Woolies, to parks nearby, completely engrossed in one of the conversations and while I hope they have made me atleast a bit smarter, I'm sure they've captivated me immensely. It's been a pleasure and a blessing.